Social Drupal Is the New WordPress

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.

Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the droodges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all off, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.