Yesterday while I was off dealing with a bunch of personal things; hence the lack of posting across the board, it seems that the theme of all software should be social (Fred Wilson) was high on the radar for folks.
It seems that just about everyone wants to push us into a social web experience; whether it be Cisco who is buying up existing social networks to companies like Ning who provide a platform for you to create your own network. The response to the move by Cisco has generally been of the WTF curiosity of the reasoning for the purchases of Tribe.net and FiveAcross.
This though seems to be a smaller slice of the socialization push as envisioned by folks like Fred Wilson who apparently can’t use software that isn’t connected to other people anymore
It might be as simple as a text editor in which Brad and Andrew are connected to me. It might be as complicated as Facebook. It really doesn’t matter. If there aren’t faces and profiles, the software is less useful to me.
Well I hate to be a downer on this group hug of social warm and fuzzy but come on enough is enough. I realize that the majority of the folks pushing this whole idea are also the ones who think that the web is the next great OS but how about before we all climb on this social bus we fix the stuff we already have.
Email is a broken pipeline of spam, browsers can’t even decide on standards, trojans and spyware flow like candy from a piñata. This is not to mention that like everything else web 2.0 oriented it is predicated on easy access to 24/7/365 broadband connections which doesn’t exist as a common entry point for everyone.
With all the great brains that are working so hard to socialize the medium you would think that fixing; and making better and safe, what we would already have would be a simple thing. Instead they all seem to be rushing to ignore the problems and build something new on top of a flawed system.
Ask any builder what happens when you build anything on a flawed foundation – it will come tumbling down. We are already pushing the Internet towards a bandwidth roadblock with the increasing demand of video and gigabyte sized files so how will the additional use of peoplized applications impact the load it is carrying?
Along with the undeniable fact that we should fix what we already have there is also a much simpler thing to consider. What if I don’t want to be social … what if I just want to enjoy a nice quiet evening of surfing and maybe writing a few emails or just crafting a plain line or two in my text editor.
We have enough encroachment of our internet time by government with increasing demands of data retention and by corporations shoving more and more user tracking advertising. The last thing I want is to feel that I need to have JoeBob and Auntie Sue looking over my shoulder as I compose the next great novel.
Not to mention – sometimes I just want to be alone and as much as the social network/software proponents might think that we all need to be a part of a larger group in everything we do this is not the case.
