Duodekapus Scobleiensis Socialis Medianensis

From the Dept of mis-filed Phyla....

Robert Scoble thinks he has discovered a Social Media Starfish, but it has 12 "legs" and these legs are actually tentacles, as they reach deep into the sea of mediacrity and sucker many people in. Therefore its more like a 12 tentacled Octopus - yes, dear reader, its a DuoDekapus!

But no sooner discovered, he is concerned that the spread of Google will perhaps change it forever. Quoth He:

What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Well, as he discovered it we will call it Duodekapus Scobleiensis....but can Google disrupt it?

Intrepid Socio-Medialogist Marc Andreessen has some footage of the encroaching Googleverse here

Strictly speaking the Google play is more like a MSFT gambit, ie an attempt to define a de Facto platform for all to use rather than a totally open one, but in the nature of the evolution of virtual species its the usual step between closed systems and totally open systems.

Its probably a necessary step for any business entity to take - cue Duodekapus Enterprisis 2.0 (2.0 as the Ancient Greeks had neither decimals nor zeros) - as they don't like closed solutions but they do like contracts (aka butts to kick when things go wrong). It also helps developers all along the value chain as they know they can write to it and it will interwork across many platforms (rather than the write many, read once that bedevils mobile).

My own hope is that Google decides to open it up fully sooner rather than later, as the lesson in Web 1.0 was that people wanted (ie paid a lot of money for, and used a lot) open Platforms and want to see competition on Services.


So - for Duodekapus Scobleiensis to really thrive, it needs to roam and feed on free data.