Human nature shows up, gets drunk and pisses in the Web2.0 party punchbowl…
No, my cats haven’t gone on strike and let the mice scamper all over my head while sleeping. I’ve been geeking around with Facebook for the last couple of months, enough time to start to really get impressed with the way that the app has enough playfulness to be interesting, without having turned into a ho-for-all the way that MySpace did.
Well, along comes Tim O’Reilly (yeah, the guy who owns O’Reilly publishing), and his gang of purple-fingered night elves have masticated the numbers and figured out that although there are about 5,000 apps for Facebook, the majority of the users are only into very, very few of them.
So a few questions arise out of all this: first of all, what the hell (who the hell?) is Slide and what is it that they/he have got going on that is so damn compelling? The only thing that comes up right away is the slide show, and I’m sorry, but I have problems believes that the millions of college students et alles who are on Facebook are all buggin’ over showing off their slides. Then again, what the hell do I know? Maybe the slides of the barforamas and kegstands are the killer app of Facebook so far… guess I better slap the slide app onto my profile page and see if it’s all that & bag of high-fiber Tostitos.
The second question that arises is one that also came up in the comments section, and which O’Reilly kinda addressed while appearing to disagree, while all the while actually citing stuff that seemed to reinforce the objection that the commenter was making. Aw hell, just go there and check it out. Some gink said that the way steep dropoff on the chart showed that the (somewhat) discredited Long Tail really doesn’t have any juice, that the winners are taking all the cake and the losers are barely able to draw enough eyeballs and installs to get their friends&family onboard with whatever widget/app they’re trying to hawk.
Which is something that has some serious implications for the whole social networking scene. If the reaction of people to the whole many-to-many communication paradigm is to huddle up and only sample the same old stuff that all their friends are grubbing on, then what’s the point, really? Any herd instinct type behavior from the users is something that can then be predicted, gamed, co-opted, commodified, processed, marketed and sold. And then there goes the whole Cluetrain glowing power to the people disintermediated future of the web.
I’d like to think that this is just the graphing of a very immature media platform at work, but I can’t shake the feeling that some of the rosier predictions of freedom for all are running headlong into human nature, in much the same way that the visions of Messers Marx & Engels did back in, oh, about 1924…
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