Coalescing thoughts about what I’m calling “the Web decorporation” – the return of smallish communities connected by Web technologies not for financial gain, not to advance the interests of a corporation, and not to help you climb a ladder but just because you want to have friends, hear from folks who aren’t your friends but could be, and generally build working communities around shared interests that, rather being religious or political, are more sub-cultural and nerdy. Peak nostalgia.
A possible story of the evolutionary path from “OldNet” Web 1.0 experiences to CorpoWeb walled-garden “social media”. How we got there tells us how to get away.
Communications media (email, RSS, BBS, IMs, blogs) –> friend of a friend style 2nd order recommendations (web/blogrings, RSS aggregators) –> anti-federative “friend-casting” platforms, ex., Friendster, MySpace, Orkut) –> nth order six-degrees/weak-link algorithm platforms (“you are the product” platforms, ex. Facebook, Twitter)