I caught this on the social web.tv today. Jeremiah Owyang talking about the Five eras of the social web. I missed this first time around but interesting to read about now.
Running List of the Five Eras of The Social Web
For details on this report, access the high level blog post, or if you’re a client, access the full report on the Forrester site.
Era of Social Relationships (started 1995, matured in 2003-2007)
This era is mature.
- AOL, 1995
- eCircles, 2001
- MySpace, Facebook, Twitter
Era of Social Functionality (started 2007, matures in 2010-2012)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity, as we’ve not seen true useful utilities to improve business.
- Facebook’s F8 Platform, May 2007
- Google and partners Open Social, Nov 2007
- LinkedIn’s business platform, Oct 2008
Era of Social Colonization (started 2009, matures in 2011)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity when your entire digital experience is social.
- Facebook Beacon, Nov 2007
- Facebook Connect, over 4000 sites, like SFgate, Techcrunch, May 2008
- Facebook’s Activity Feed, April 2009
- OpenStack’s OAuth and OpenID, thanks Matt Savarino
- I reviewed Get Glue which is a meta social network that aggregates social reviews from your friends –regardless of location.
- Facebook has agreed to support OpenID, May 2009
- Xbox Live to integrate Twitter and Facebook, June 2009
Era of Social Context (starts in 2010, matures in 2012)
This era is certainly not in maturity, but we can see some early examples of demographic scraping.
- There are no current examples
Era of Social Commerce (starts in 2011, matures in 2013)
These are prelimnary examples, such as Techcrunch’s crunchpad, but it’s not a true example of a crowd created, spec’d product.
- There are no current examples
For the Social Commerce era, you could also place Gdgt.com but more importantly everything the VRM (vendor relationship management) guys have been working on for a while. Also got to say social commerce starts to make sense of that reverse relationship of VRM.