Auch gut

Living in a Networked World

Well, it is true that these applications do Less of stuff we don’t want, an undeniably good thing. But it isn’t true that they do Less of everything. In fact, they do More of a critical function of Web 2.0 applications. What is it that they do that’s so critical?

They’re networked. And being networked allows them them to accurately model our social behavior, of course! Almost overnight, we are using these software applications to better fulfill our basic human needs of communication, gossip, collaboration, sharing, and Attention. All things we do in our human network. Now we’re doing it in networked software.

The big shift in Web 2.0 is not that we want Less, despite some of the horribly bloated desktop applications we’ve had to put up with. In fact, we want More, and we’re getting it!

In essence, we have traded siloed applications for networked ones. We’ve migrated away from the featuritis of desktop applications to socially-enabled networked ones. The featuritis was a beneficial casualty of the move. So it’s not just about Less features. It’s about Social features.