Hate to tell you, but Web 1.0 was social too.
Earlier today, I presented at iBreakfast's Web 2.0 NYC Best Practices Conference. As you can imagine, there was a lot of talk about social media and how it has made it possible for people to connect and share with one another online.
Tru dat, but this afternoon has me asking myself if this is really that different from so-called Web 1.0. Ah yes, here we go with another 'Verdino as Cranky Old Man' post...
I'm old enough to remember dial-up and "Internet in a Box" (the first commercially available Internet software package.) In other words, I'm ancient. But I also remember that back then -- this would have been 1991 or so -- the Internet was mostly about connecting with other people with the aid of new networked technologies.
You didn't log on for content (there wasn't much to be had) or commerce (for the most part, nobody was selling much of anything over the web) or to see what your favorite companies were up to (few, if any, were jumping headlong into this new web thing at that point.)
You logged on to participate in forums, message boards or bulletin board systems -- to post messages, read others, visit and revisit to check out the latest replies. You logged on for conversations with a bunch of your closest strangers in America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy chat rooms (in fact, you might have been doing this as early as the 1980s.) If you were truly plugged in, you might have joined The WELL, one of the earliest (and today, longest running) online communities. I wasn't cool enough for The WELL, but I certainly spent more than a few hours a week chatting and sharing content in rooms and on boards.
If you did these things enough, you got to know some of the more prominent "personalities" at any of your favorite online haunts -- and they got to know you. You might not have had a formalized list of friends and followers, but you certainly had a set of ambient friendships with people you came to know largely (if not exclusively) through your interactions with them on the newly popularized World Wide Web.
Of course, somewhere between then and now the corporations moved in -- turning the 'first generation' web into a tawdry Times Square of brochure-ware, banner ads and eventually Flash microsites. But that isn't where the whole thing started. As I remember it, it started with people and connections and sharing.
No doubt, the technologies have changed. Bulletin boards gave way to blogs; chat rooms to presence applications; and so forth. And today's shiny Web 2.0 objects are certainly much sexier, thanks to developments as diverse as Ajax and widespread broadband connectivity.
But the behaviors aren't so different, are they?
Are we overestimating the extent to which social media has truly changed the web -- or more precisely, the way people use the web?
Chime in.
