All sites will be social sites

Posted by Ben on May 18th, 2008 6 Comments

The last couple of weeks have seen pronouncements about making the entire Web - not just social networking sites - more social, where everyone can connect and interact easily.

There have been some impressive announcements to enable frictionless social grease - Google, MySpace, and Facebook all agree it’s the future - and of course the expected fights.

But it’s all grease and no engine. The social ‘grease’ of connections isn’t what we should be looking at to take us forward. The big step comes when anyone, on any site, can not only connect but actually do something - together. From my perspective, that something is social publishing. Social publishing is the new Web frontier. That big step comes today.Social publishing is about letting users be your authors. It owes huge thanks to the social networking phenomena. With social networking, millions upon millions of internet users have become comfortable finding, connecting, and interacting online. And as those folks mature online, they have started asking “Now what?” It’s a logical question - how much value really is created when the only thing you can do together is poke, bite, or friend someone?Social publishing is the answer to “now what?” With social publishing, anyone can create, collect, and organize content anywhere online.

And by anywhere I mean any website. The notion that a 100% professionally authored, locked down website will be relevant in 5 year’s time is patently absurd. People’s expectations are changing and they expect to interact and create content alongside professionally authored content. And audiences will want this experience as well. Sites that don’t participate will be left behind. While there will always be a place online for top-tier professional journalists and authors, time is short for websites that don’t invite and celebrate user-generated content that seamlessly exists alongside.

Until now, it was easy for publishers to ignore the trend. They would argue that none of their readers wanted to contribute or the technology was too complicated and expensive to implement. Both of those excuses are gone. Every day, more and more proof points demonstrate the value of user-generated content. And today, with the announcement of Wetpaint Injected, the technology to unleash zero-cost create potential is as easy as a couple of snippets of code. The Wetpaint vision of every site on the web being a social site where people connect and do more together is not far off.

I’m proud that Wetpaint is in a unique position to lead this transformation. And to the sites that fight the wave, the writing will soon be on the wall. And I bet the writing will be written collaboratively.

Keyword Tags: Collaboration, New Media, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Wetpaint

Comments

Thanks Wetpaint! As Jeremy knows, i have been waiting for this for some time now. I have signed up to the program and can’t wait to use it on my HTML website - EMGN.

By Madusha on May 19th, 2008 at 2:21 am

This is pretty provocative information. There’s always “the next big thing” we educators have to somehow - manage - to stay in front of.

By Amy Bowllan on May 19th, 2008 at 10:44 am

Wetpaint Injected…
Just stick it in my VEINS!!

By Sidian M.S. Jones on May 21st, 2008 at 5:11 pm

my website is awesome and i love to play on it

By brooke on May 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 am

Sweet - This will be Great for the International Mac Podcast site that I am a team member of (Community Manager).

and the Budde Podcasting center - eventually.

I’ll be sure to spread the word on Wetpaint Nation today, post it in the show notes and make a blog post about it.

Josh Budde
The Talking Wiki Have you listened yet?

By Josh Budde on May 23rd, 2008 at 3:18 am

[...] year, Wetpaint is among the honored, along with our new Wetpaint Injected partner, [...]

By Wetpaint Honored by OnHollywood 100 Top Private Companies on May 30th, 2008 at 8:15 am

freshcoats, the wetpaint blog

All sites will be social sites

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