The future's social

Let’s start with real people. Real people have their own social graph of friends, family and associates, with different types of relationships. Social networks of the kind we find on the web are essentially very effective mechanisms for us to do a better job of keeping in touch with people on our social graph. Like many forms of communication, they amplify what we already want to do.

New forms of communication will emerge. They are, as yet, undefined, but they will all drive along this trail of a social graph. They won’t change anything to do with our desire to communicate. There’s a rule when you’re involved in communication: break or interrupt people’s social graphs at your peril; amplify them
and you will profit.

One size fits all

But social networks as we see them today on the web are still a very poor fit against the social graph of our life. They don’t differentiate between types of relationship, so people can get in trouble with their employers because they post material that’s inappropriate, and it’s one size fits all. If you think about a social network, it comes down to about four elements: a profile; a messaging tool; a search processes, so I can find others I know and would like to know; and usually some form of news feed. And that’s about it.

The thing that most interests me about the future of social networks is the huge gap between device and network. Our desire to communicate is no greater or less whether we’re sitting in front of a computer or not. The correct place for a social network is the device that most mimics one already: our phone.

Think about it. The phone is a tool for communication and already carries many of the base data elements of a social network in it – a contact list of all our friends and acquaintances and a way to communicate with them. It also carries the two most popular forms of communication (text and voice), it’s always with us and it’s always on.

Early days

So why aren’t social networks on our phones? It’s simply because it happened that way. And if I can have this insight, anyone can. As it happened, I went a little further and started a company in pursuit of it (Trutap), but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the largest industry in the world in many ways is the mobile industry. So when I think about where social networking is going, I think it’s going mobile and global.

A new class of social networks will emerge, moving both from the web to the phone and arising natively from the phone out into the world.The new networks that emerge will challenge TV channels, which will have to build content systems that allow people to watch what they want, when they want, intermingled with social networking.

In fact, there will be generation after generation of new players to come. What we see today are very primitive systems, but over the next couple of years hugely evolved, sophisticated new systems will emerge that are far more closely aligned with human desires. Some will grow very quickly and sell out rapidly, and some will become the next Google. It will be incredibly easy to displace Facebook. I guarantee that if something better came along that was closer to your life; the ease with which you’d move over to it would be terrifying.

Bebo was on the right track before it was bought - they’ve built that open media platform. That was just the first hint of where all this is going. But now they’ll be distracted, so the opportunity is open again.