[agentultra]

I think it's rather funny when people talk about the, "social web." Before the social graph, technorati, and flickr there were newsgroups, email lists, HTTP, IRC, etc. The Internet itself is a social tool. Perhaps the term refers to some epoch of which I am not aware but it seems to me from a big-picture perspective that we've only narrowly improved the experience since Eternal September.

The "walled garden" networks will always strive to find their value in lowering the barrier to entry for new participants on the web. Facebook makes it super easy to share your photos with your family and friends and passively update them on the minutiae of your life. Twitter does the same thing to large degree in a more public fashion. Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest... all of the same zeitgeist: user experience.

But the cognoscenti are certainly aware that the web is the sum of its parts and walled gardens are antithesis to participation within its ecosystem. However the problem is and has always been participation: there is no single sign-in, no simple user experience, no common parlance for the mainstream to absorb. We got about as far as blogs and stopped there once MySpace, Facebook, et al took over.

I'd prefer a return to the roots but I think we'll need software and services that provide a better user experience and product-based focus rather than the service-oriented approach that has become popular.

[kjackson2012]

I think it's different now than before because almost everyone is comfortable with the idea of communicating over the Internet. I used to IRC and MUD and the types of people that engaged in those activities were, for lack of a better term, more nerdy, like me. Back in the 1990s, people still weren't used to sitting in front of their computers all day long, because there largely wasn't anything to do with a non-networked computer. You could play games, or you could be writing an essay or a report, but there wasn't much else that could keep you engaged for hours upon hours, unlike today.

People used to spend more of their time talking on the phone or watching TV, or socializing. But having computers online all the time has turned it truly into a "social web".