I’m noticing a trend in the posts I’ve been reading lately and that is the rumbling about social media & networks.  Not so much about the latest & greatest, but more about how we use them.

Tim O’Reilly compared the coming storm to the LAN vs Internet realization. Asking the question Where is my Web 2.0 address book? for tying my IM, email and networks together.

Matt Dickman posted a link to an Advertising Age article which gives the results of a study telling us 96% of teens/tweens connect to an social network but not which ones are garnering their loyalty. The Quirk newsletter also carried some articles about the rise in chatter, including Sean Carlton’s one on ClickZ.

Can we start to look seriously at online social network aggregators? Is Flock the way forward by putting it in the hands of the software? Or do we have to look to the actual networks themselves such as Facebook opening up it’s API with the F8 Platform?

Where is my Trillian or Pidgin for social networks?

I think that this is something that, not only marketers and developers should be looking at, but all of us as individuals.  Are we at that point were we can influence how we communicate with each other in a more radical way than ever before?

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