Several months ago I undertook a futuristic analysis. What I have found
is that I may have caught up with the present. Without that analysis, I
would be lagging. I am again perhaps abit ahead of the pack. What
follows is some random musings, upshot, and further projections.
The question arises at this juncture, does bit.ly have a distinct
advantage over other IT companies?
On the solidification of bubbles: Blogging is an example. Is social media another bubble heading for
solidification? If so, the implication is that it will exert a profound
influence, but that it will also be relegated to its own domain,
limiting the effect. The old web will endure it, as it did blogosphere
emergence. The extreme example of this may be Technorati, a mountain
island. Twitter is arguably the latest mountain island, but the
situation is still evolving. Mountain island is a wonderful metaphor. Think of it. Japan is a mountain island. What if there were two
Japans? Three? etc? Now, break out of the metaphor. Can the old web
endure that? We are facing another wave of disruption. Services that
have intentionally broken meta-data for temporary advantage will be
hardest hit, and they should be getting busy before it is too late for
them.
Google is giving much precedence to the blogosphere over the social
networking space, because of the depth of the content. Can Google really care about soundbytes, tiny bubbles as it were. Another reason
for this precedence could be that the blogosphere predates the social
media space, and it is fully established. Social media is relatively
new and an upstart. One possible future direction for all of this
resides in the current trend to exploit file meta-data in twitter
clients in order to enrich the twitter user experience. An examination
of twitter-friendly apache file meta-data configuration is indicated,
because this trend may be moving into other arenas.
What about other trends; gay rights, cloning and biotech, infectious
disease, telepresence? On telepresence, services will emerge to provide twitter-friendly
personal files for access by social media. Those with blogs and
certain other services have sensed this, and they are already doing
it, but this trend is bound to grow. I see Google moving in this
direction, with a vastly improved personal profile and microblog
system. It is already happening. They are projecting inward to the
user, but the better aim is for the user to project outwards. Of course
this is also in part what blogging and social media actually is.
The other trends may recieve attention in future articles, as it were
;-}.
Back to bit.ly... Meta-data munging by url-shortening services and link content caching
would be a possible projection, and one imagines that the plan is
already underway, and some aspects are already happening now.
On constriction of bubble size and solidification: There are vested interests who would like to see all of these trends
limited in their scope. There are various strategies, such as
redirection of users to a small group of friends and related strategies.
Diversion. Degradation. Derision. Slander. These are integrative and
progressive strategies. "Shut up, no one cares what you have to say!";
a self-negating statement, but it often works.
All of this points again to a GNU-Darwin blog service. Blogs are
already well tailored to accurate meta-data representation and
telepresence projection. Maybe I will actually do it this time ;-}.
Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/
Michael L. Love
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