Jeff Jarvis on Davos: Identity
From Jeff’s post on Identity - created at Davos this year:
* Every mogul wants a social network like Rupert’s; media people kept begging for clues about how to build social webs about and around their stuff. One of the young moguls at Davos said that media properties are not meant to be social networks. I’ll disagree somewhat: The sad thing is that old media don’t realize that if they had just opened up years ago, they’d have seen that they already had social networks. I tell magazine people that they have communities gathering around the good stuff they create or find that we all like; newspapers have local communities. But because they were closed castles that kept their communities outside, they didn’t realize this. And so the people outside have gone to build their own social structures — which they clearly always wanted — now that they can. Too late for the big, old guys? Maybe.
I wonder if Jeff will accept sales commissions from all the business he’s helping us sign-up right now? This is exactly what our product PeopleAggregator is for. So that all those media moguls don’t have to spend $1M or more for their SNS! Just give me a call!
Jeff points out that its not about cloning MySpace - but empowering users to contribute to the Internet - associated with the media companies brand, logo or assets. The way I always explain it is - “They’re gonna do it anyway, so you might as well empower them and associate yourself with them - rather than try and gight it! Then along the way - they might even listen to some of your ’so-called’ Hits.”
Jeff also refers to some ‘elegant solution proposed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Clearly Facebook is leading the way with their open APIs, but they’ve got to improve the onerous TOS and enable us to actually USE that data - rather than constrict its usage.
I am incredibly enthused by Jeff’s understanding and grokkiness level.
I think the real opportunity is not to start a social network but to better enable the social network that the internet already is, to pull together our distributed identities and help us manage them and make the connections we want to make. That comes through the expression of our identities. We express that both with our content and our connections: We are the company we keep.
I have to hope and assume that Jeff will warmly welcome our product, its concepts and what it’ll be able to accomplish to continue their trend towards open inter-connected social networks.
By supporting open standards, providing a deep, best of breed set of features, and covering both social networking and blogging - PeopleAggregator provides an opportunity for media companies to become part of the global, inter-connected social network - we call the Internet.
