Should Microsoft or Google save the web2.0 universe?

Jeez! This is 2008, and contrary to my childhood beliefs (way back in the sixties of the previous century) there is not only no manned Moon or Mars station, but even very mundane things, such as integrated tools to collaborate effectively using texts, documents, pictures, videos, spreadsheets, databases, conferencing tools, poll instruments, wikis and meeting environments are as yet not available as a kind of a standardized, easy-to-use and accessible solution. This was a lament uttered today by a friend of mine, an academic economist, specialized in efficiency measurement and working regularly with ad hoc international teams.

I had not an immediate answer. Of course there is web2.0, and there are many solutions facilitating several aspects of collaboration. Virtual worlds are one family of such tools. But those tools are dispersed, many creative people all over the world are constantly proposing now solutions using social tools. But a one stop solution, familiar for many people all over the world and massively used, does as yet not exist. The sheer variety of tools makes people who are not professionally covering web2.0 desperate, even digital natives are overwhelmed by the abundance of web2.0 offerings.

So where is web2.0 going? I previously mentioned some answers given by Professor Tony O'Driscoll. Now I would like to introduce social media expert Shel Israel, who has some insightful things to say about where we are going. And finally I will call Microsoft or Google to the rescue!

Without further ado, here is Israel's take on social media:

I think the master trend is that social media technology will be continuously refined so that people will be able to behave and interact online as they do in everyday life. This is a long-term trend that started years ago, perhaps with the telegraph or maybe with the jungle drum. It speeds up and slows down but it keeps relentlessly moving forward.

In his article The Future of Social Media on Global Neighbourhoods Israel identifies the following ideas which can become true: virtual reality in teaching, computers will emerge out of the boxes (enabling for instance conversations between avatars on desktops or in living rooms) and global neighbourhoods which will turn into marketplaces.

I think those "ideas" are already more than ideas of course. The education community is developing into a laboratory of collaboration tools and experiments, maybe because educators are by nature more collaboration oriented. I signed up for the Second Life Cohort of people attending a course about Connectivism. The learning experience will be mediated by all kinds of social media tools. On the blog for this course I read that by the end of July 1,200 persons signed up for the course, which means that the course can be rightly called a MOOC or Massive Online Course, which makes it even more necessary to make clever use of social media technology. Tools which are being used include Second Life, Elluminate, Moodle, and of course Facebook, Twitter, and wikis.

So yes, there is progress, towards a world where geography becomes less important and where online life and interactions in the physical world are becoming so integrated that the boundaries between virtual, online and real become even more problematic.

But no, this is by no means self-evident for the vast majority of mankind. Even focusing on the tiny subgroup of relatively rich, young people (digital natives even), it seems that social media are moving so fast and are so dispersed that youngsters simply limit themselves to some limited uses of a limited set of tools and don't even try to master the many different tools that are out there.

First I thought this was a problem typical for certain countries in Western Europe, but I soon realized it is a universal problem. Howard Rheingold, who teaches about social media at Stanford and Berkeley, admits in a recent video about the SocialMediaClassroom that his students were shocked that they had to use forums, social bookmarking, video sharing, rss feeds, tagging, wikis, blogs etc. So he develops now an integrated suite of social media which can help his students to navigate and use the rich world of social media. It is not a desperate attempt to replace existing tools, but a way to familiarize people with the different subsets of social tools.

The limitations are obvious. It is not clear whether the SocialMediaClassroom will integrate practice in Second Life for instance. Even when this would be the case, what about the steep learning curve of this particular world, and the far from perfect integration with very common social media and presentation tools? What about other virtual environments, organized in different ways, using different interfaces etc? But I guess virtual immersive meeting techniques can be integrated in the suite, if this would not already be the case.

People try to allocate scarce resources such as time in a way which seems rational to them. For many people this allocation means there is little or no time to familiarize themselves with all the different web2.0 tools, far from it. They seem to clamor for a Microsoft or a Google which provides a one-stop-solution, which will be ridiculed by the geeks, but which is just fine for about 90 percent of the potential users. My question is: should a social media suite like Rheingold designs, eventually augmented with a virtual environment component, become a product which is being mass-marketed by some dominant players?