King  Gary 

Stowe Boyd’s recent post, entitled ‘Traffic and Flow’, really resonates with me, and the bottom line that I get out of reading it is how future web applications will increasingly have more and more social aspects to them. This is pretty obvious to a lot of people, including me, but what I like about this post was that it really solidifies that idea into my mind a whole lot more. What I dislike about it is that this post is just like the countless other posts that keep on saying the same things over and over again, mentioning the same phrases such as ‘river of news’, the ‘flow of information’, and how data will all soon be ‘pushed’ to the user (these aren’t specific references to Stowe; I’m just generalizing what I see in many blog posts). Emily Chang’s post about her own data stream that she had recently created to consolidate several feeds from different social websites partially stimulated Stowe to post his own thoughts on this topic, and he also mentions that he has a solution for Emily’s initial issue that is in the works.

The web is going to have a more ’social’ future

This really does seem like where this whole web 2.0 shift is taking us; we’re moving to a web landscape where most, if not all, of the web applications that plan to become popular among regular folks will contain many social features that will be implemented in one way or another, and in a way where it becomes a two-way conversation, meaning visitors can respond to what they see on the website. Basic examples include blogs, where visitors can comment on posts, social networking websites, where visitors can comment on one another’s profiles, and even websites where having any social aspect to them was seemingly strange and odd to include back in the past, such as a social stocks website or a social money management website.

How do we implement this ’social’-ness to future websites?

Even though the future of the web seems to become clearer every day, with the help of the above mentioned explanation, it’s also important to note that implementations of social aspects to websites have to be included with an excellent sense of where things fit in, and a great eye for detail. I also believe that ‘we’ (this pronoun is generalizing an extremely large group of people) have to stop ‘making sense’ of ‘web 2.0′, and just start building applications that can help us do stuff as easy as possible, instead of building web applications that help give us more stuff to do (for the sake of doing that particular activity). There’s a big difference between the two.

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