An aside: The changing media landscape - Moving to a more open web

The media landscape is rapidly changing. A long long time ago, mass media communication involved a small number of large media companies communicating with large proportions of the available audience. Media consumption was an almost universally shared experience - everyone read the same few newspapers, watched the same few television programmes and went to see the same few movies at the cinema. Then cable television came along and suddenly hundreds of television channels were available to all. While mass 'hits' still existed (e.g. "Star Wars", "Titanic"), the media landscape became more fractured as more people watched and read more different things.

With the Internet, both media consumption and creation have fractured to an unprecedented degree. To borrow an analogy from Charles Leadbeater (author of We-Think), "if the media landscape is a beach, where once there were just a few large boulders of rock, now there are a million tiny pebbles scattered along the shore". These new 'pebbles' of media are largely created by the audience rather than professional media organisations, enabled by a slew of web technologies that invite anyone and everyone to create content ranging from blogs to videos to reviews to comments, to simple status updates. More and more, people are being defined online by the trail of 'pebbles' they leave behind them.

More recently, social networking services have emerged enabling more web users to start to congregate around their friends, and to look to their friends for content and links to interesting content, creating a more personal kind of web experience. People have started to cast off the anonymity borne from the early days of the web and to bring online their real identities, communicating and sharing their web experience with their friends and peers.

The web, however, is still largely wired according to a time when people congregated with strangers and behind multiple anonymous identities. The answer to this has been the emergence of the concept of an "open web". Here, it is proposed that websites start to adopt certain technologies that 'open up' their website to integration with existing social network services such that users on that website can easily share activities therein with their peers through a given social networking service. In an ideal manifestation of this vision, a set of standard technologies would be adopted by all web sites and services, enabling one to take their friends with them around the web, to see their friends content easily as they browse, staying connected to them and their thoughts from site to site.

Today's online shopping, for example, means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducting a transaction. In a vision of an open web, this Amazon page would find out who my friends are, find out if they have reviewed the product I'm buying, and show me my friends reviews first and foremost. Moreover, it might find content from other sites relating to this product that has been created by my friends, and pull this into the page (e.g. a review by a friend on the Barnes & Noble online store for the same product). Much more powerful (and interesting) than the recommendation of strangers is the recommendation of real people and friends you know. In another example, when you visit a blog you are typically presented with page after page of comments. Information over-load, in other words. In an open web world, it should be possible to quickly and easily jump to comments made by people you care about. In other words, the collective intelligence/brain of your friends and peers can follow you and be at your disposal anywhere on the web, in a standard, universal way.

Today this is to a large extent a pipedream. Through APIs available on services like Facebook, some sites like YouTube have automatic sharing of videos uploaded and comments made with friends on that service. Some blogs have adopted specialised systems like Disqus that allow a person to carry a single identity to each adopting blog, and to track comments made by friends. In other words, current efforts toward a more open web are in their infancy and are fractured. There is only sporadic adoption of integration with existing social networking services, and what adoption is there is spread across different services.

There is an opportunity to realise and deliver the future of social networking. The future of social networking is not in centralisation, but is cross-site, universal and distributed. It is in the creation of a web that is personal to each of us. That is, it is in a tool that allows people to establish their presence on any webpage - that gives users unprecedented control to edit and modify the web around them to reflect their thoughts, ideas and opinions, and to share this 'in-context presence" with their friends. Such a tool will turn every webpage into a social space that disrupts traditional communication between marketer and consumer, website and visitor.

YayTrail aims to be such a tool. We believe that it is possible to facilitate a user to create content on any website using one identity and to share this with friends. This will make the web more open to user generated content in more advanced ways than ever before.

Using Yaytrail, any webpage becomes an open and social space where you and your friends can add knowledge, opinions, ideas and insights, providing a definitive and personalised web experience that is created and edited by your peers. Yaytrail is very simple and casual-friendly to use. The editing interface is very natural for anyone used to normal word processing, and allows easy spontaneous participation in any webpage. Our system allows for content creation in line and in the structure of the page - not as overlaid sticky-notes or other layers that can obstruct and make a mess of the structure of a page, and that look out of place. We don't employ any sidebar that consumes screen real estate in the user's browsers, nor do we add anything to the browser chrome. It's a very simple, visually lightweight system that allows the creation of content in a way that is direct and makes sense in a given page. Yaytrail aggregates the trail of content created by you and your friends to help you discover new and interesting webpages and content, putting you in touch with what's hot right now on the web among your friends.

The future

Social networking is here to stay. Social networking is the future of the web, constantly developing and taking on new qualities. We believe YayTrail offers a new set of qualities in this field, cracking open the webpage to direct and in-line user enhancement. By doing so, and by allowing users to share this content among each other, we believe we are giving web users a much finer level of control in content creation and communication online. We hope you will share in this journey with us.

The YayTrail team

Posted by Peter at 1:03 PM