Social Networks made a big splash, and we are still trying to recover from the hype (where is Facebook going?). But while it is nice to share pictures and videos, this is not much more than entertainment and another cool way to waste time.
Meanwhile I also see the workforce getting organized and social networks with a purpose. There was the grassroot movement during the previous presidential election, the voting machine incident with Diebold against a network of activists as described by Yochai Benkler in "The Wealth of Networks". And all this is now getting corporate: I watched the coworking movement start in San Francisco and expand all over the Globe, I see efforts at the infrastructure level, such as FON, and I see discussions around social networks of business development consultants, CFOs, developers, designers, tech support experts, etc... Soon you will be able to do business by just getting resources from the relevant network. You will pick them from each other based on their rating, how far they are from people in your direct network and how much they cost.
Michel Bauwens talks about P2P civilization and Xavier Comtesse talks about Direct Economy (and even Direct Anything)
I see the emergence of a world of guilds of specialists, similar to the ecosystems that John Seely Brown describes in his book "The Only Sustainable Edge".
Ultimately, I see a lot of opportunities: if this is where we are going, what else do we need to make the guilds system completely functional?
Friday, January 25, 2008
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