geinig

The story of 2012 wasn't Facebook's IPO, although that event serves as a handy marker for the end of a certain era of the web. We argued that the Internet has always been highly social and that if you look beyond the edges of the web to email, IRC, AIM, Gchat, etc, you'd see that people have been sharing with each other since the web sprung into existence in the 1990s. Facebook and Twitter didn't give us the ability to share with each other at all; they just structured it. That structure makes it easier for individuals to act as publishers and it makes it easier for the companies to monetize your contributions to their sites. That's fine, but that's not the story that the social web crowd sold us. They ignored, and asked us to ignore, all the sharing that had gone before so that the deal they were offering us looked better. Unfortunately, the era that spawned these companies is coming to a close. The rise of mobile content consumption will disrupt the ad model they were built on. Social network fatigue is going to erode what's possible. The infighting between the social nets is making all the products worse. The organizing narrative that said, "Make it social," as the default answer to any business question will be erased. And then what happens? We'll see in 2013.
-- ACM