SocialPhysics

Social Networking

Bruce Hoppe (a.k.a. Connectedness) posted a summary of some of the latest bloggings on Social Commerce today.  Bruce comes to Social Commerce from the Social Network Analysis perspective.

An interesting question raised by the NY Times article he mentions and by this NY Times article       A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target., is what will be the adoption tragetory for new technologies and patterns of social networking across generations over time? Clearly generations that came of age after the advent of IM have broadly embraced IM.  Previous generations are blogging, but at lower rates than Millenials.  How much of this will persist over time?   How much is this due to differences in technology preferences and how much is due to differences in life stage interets?   (Photosharing is a useful tool for dating, and also for trading picture of the grand kids....)   How will the favorite social commerce features for Millenials vary from those for Baby Boomers?

Social Commerce?

SocialPhysics is focused on creating the "social web" and fostering a new generation of user-centric web applications.  We've devoted the last couple of years to foundational issues such as identity, reputation, and relationship management (you can follow the identity activity in the IdentityGang wiki, for example.) 

One of the areas where the SocialPhysics approach can provide tremendous value is e-commerce. Over the past year, we've been spending more and more of our time re-thinking e-commerce.  Social Commerce is the blending of the "best" of e-commerce with with "best" of social networking.  Social Commerce is also about inverting the traditional e-commerce paradigm.  It is about commerce organized on behalf of the consumer.

Doc Searls had a great post today on Company Relationship Management (the user-centric version of Customer Relationship Management) and thinking "outside the advertising box".  You'll be hearing a lot more about Social Commerce in 2006.