Evolution of communication - Explicit to implicit
Posted by anup on May 16, 2008
We went from closed communication on email to closed real time communication over IM. Along came always connected communication using SMS and mobile. Blogs and social networks made us go public with our messages to friends and now twitter is making us broadcast minute by minute updates of our lives.
So trying to force a sequential timeline on how we communicate in the digital world, looks something like:
BBS/IRC > Bulletin boards > Chat rooms> Email > IM > SMS > Blogs/Social networks > Twitter/Lifestreaming
Most of this is often described as ‘explicit communication or explicit social networks’. As per the Churchill Club of Silicon Valley debate, the next big trend on internet is going to be ‘Implicit web’ (read the post on VentureBeat). This is the missing element when RWW tried to discuss the evolution of communication.
We at MangoSpring firmly believe in the future of implicit communities fostering communication. The fact that you are on the same site/page as x other users puts you in an implicit community allowing communication, sharing and collaboration. It also captures your ‘attention data’ and build the community around it. Of course the secret sauce is going to be how you group the people beyond presence on a site or membership to a community. So if i am on TechCrunch reading yet another post on twitter or FriendFeed I am going to want to crib and rant about it to others who are reading the same post. But I would rather do it on TechCrunch as I read it. Don’t expect me to sign up to a group or community or a social network to be able to do so. And it would be great if users who were reading up on FriendFeed competition that just launched are also implicitly visible to me so they can join in the discussion.
So if you are wondering where that leaves the explicit communities ( read as Facebook, Myspace, Ning) ? Well I dont think much changes for them there is always going to be a need for both. Though I do see interesting scenarios where we merge the membership of explicit networks with the communities I am implicitly part of.