Web 3.0 / Social Web

Just viewed a very interesting interview with Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, who just came out with his Social Media Report.

In this interview Owyang talks about 5 eras of social media:

1. Relationships - mature, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.
2. Functionality - nascent, e.g., Facebook apps - but much more to do
3. Colonization - your whole experience is social, e.g, Facebook Connect
4. Context - your social persona provides information to marketers, hopefully a quid pro quo - changes way marketers measure their interaction with you, too.
5. Commerce - power to the people - group-designed products

The list and discussion are here.

Beehive has been thinking hard about issues like this, especially #4 - what happens when your social identity becomes ubiquitous? How do we encourage people to use social media?

Yes, now that Oprah is using Twitter, its visibility is high, but there's still not much return for many potential users.

This relates to browsers, too. Firefox has probably 340 million users. What if it became a social media platform? Click here to see an interesting article. Both Facebook and FF have apps associated with them.

As we design Web 3.0 sites, we'll be able to take advantage of all of this.