The Web Itself Is The Social Network

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media versus the blogosphere. To help distinguish them, the term social network is synonymous with social media, whereas I refer to the blogosphere as ‘online networking’. But today I discovered something that clarifies and simplifies this latter term.

Online networking is simply…the internet! I kind of knew that already, but I didn’t know how to articulate it in a way that helped distinguish it from social media, you know, the walled-gardens and silos that seemed to evolve from blogging.

The discovery I made today is called micro.blog, which led me to the site inessential by Brent Simmons. There, I found a statement that shed more light on the subject:

"Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network."

-Brent Simmons – inessential.com

The web itself is the great social network. This is music to my ears! Or poetry. You get what I’m saying.

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In a discussion about the latest Facebook privacy scandal and the ills of social media in general, I heard someone mention micro.blog as an alternative to Twitter. I like Twitter, and I like new tech things. So I had to check it out. That’s when I found the distinction above: micro.blog is not an alternative silo.

Earlier, I published a blog post about Walt Mossberg quitting Facebook. In it, I wondered what new social paradigm might replace social media as we know it.

On top of that, in a post I wrote last week, I suggested that the blogosphere, or at least the best parts of it, could be the best alternative to social media, perhaps in an updated form.

At first glance, micro.blog seems to be an incredible fit to all of this.

It sort of encapsulates a way to have independent blogs (a bit of the past from the blogosphere) and a common “stream” or “feed” where everyone’s blog posts can appear (a bit of the present from social media) for a modern combo of online networking.

Like the best of both worlds, maybe micro.blog takes the positive benefits of blogging and Facebooking, leaves out the bad parts, and refines them into a bit of the future alternative we may all need online.

This is all my first impressions and some speculation I guess. But it’s intriguing. And worth looking into. I mean, does this not sound pretty awesome?

"Instead of yet another social network, Micro.blog is designed to work with the open web. It’s built on RSS and independent microblogs. It’s about pulling together short posts and making them more useful and easier to interact with. It prioritizes both a safe community of microblogs as well as the freedom to post to your own site."

-Manton Reece

After 2018’s social media problems, maybe 2019 is the time to move on from things like Facebook once and for all.

Any thoughts?