fowa - 2/24/09

The Old Folks have arrived at Facebook, en masse. It hasn't been that we weren't following Facebook, and to a lesser extent, MySpace, or skilled enough to use them, but many social media inclined, well, adults, hesitated to encroach on our children's territory. They tried not to let us, initially requiring a dot edu email address for access, but many of the platform's first users are out of college and working now, and it's evolved to include marketing activities, so they might as well accept that it's time for us to join them. Smart companies, even local businesses, surely benefit from a social media presence. Connecting directly with customers is unquestionably beneficial, building relationship and good reputation, invaluable. That huge interwoven network of consumer interacting is like a big sucking irresistible vacuum, making commercial intrusion inevitable. Their kiddie toy is all grown up, for better and for worse.

The trend pendulum never stops, and even those things rendered timeless and almost permanent by superiority (caramel), rise and fall in popularity, evolve, like living organisms, adapting to changing circumstances, growing, remaining alive. I grow, you grow, we grow collectively, or else we're degenerating, and we wouldn't want that. The internet itself isn't such a baby anymore. Web 2.0 is maturing and parents and their adult children are finally in community online. This is not a trend on the wane (pomegranate). There are not going to be fewer companies building websites with blogs, making friends on Facebook and tweeting. More importantly, listening to their customers' tweets and updates to get to know what people want will become not a get ahead tool, but a survival tool.

The notion of killer app slipped away in the accelerated growth pace of digital interactivity, after so many came and went with astonishing speed, looking not so killer after all. Maybe it was all one app, growing and changing, with many facets. Online community, interaction in which the primary criteria for relationship is, given access to the web and a desire to learn new technology stuff, shared ideas. Age, race, and geography matter less, if almost not at all, in the world of online community. It'll be interesting to watch how our young adults will react, now that their parents have joined them on Facebook. The younger ones, the tweens and teens, are developing their ways of interacting outside the view of their parents, just like teenagers have done forever, and I have no doubt that the young ones' places to play online will evolve in a new direction where we're not, just like they ran screaming to higher-waisted skinny-legged jeans as soon as their moms figured out that low slung and wide-legged was not just slimming but also more comfortable.

I've been to Delta Computers twice recently. It's an old-school geek-centric computer store, off Peachtree Industrial just outside of I-285. They have an online store, but their website shows that there's a huge difference between the geeks who love the hardware and create code and the internet geeks exploring and expanding the web. There's no store address on the website, no phone number, although the Google search that takes you there, includes all that information. Their website has no description of the company, its goals, policies, history or store hours, no real copy beyond navigation and very dry product description. The store's as old-school as the website, built by and for hardware geeks. Both times I've been there, I've gotten excellent, immediate and satisfactory service, although the second trip was necessitated by a bad part purchased on the first visit. They replaced it instantly. I asked on my second visit, which was their primary revenue flow, the website or walk-in traffic, and he replied the latter, without hesitation. I also asked if they were really feeling the current downturn, and he said not so much. I started to ask if they were on Twitter or Facebook, thinking there's a whole market of internet geeks who are hardware challenged, needing tech support, but I didn't need to. Of course they aren't. They should be. Everyone should be.

There is no more disconnection. When I go too long without posting on this blog and y'all start to wonder what I'm doing (as if), my Twitter Updates in the right gutter keep the connection lit. My whereabouts and activities are only as cold as my last Tweet. When I have to work on an historic Presidential Inauguration Day, even though I'd rather be home watching it all on television, not only can I watch it online, but I can do so with my friends on Facebook (even if my work computer wouldn't let me into the First Draft Crack Van), where I'm now a member of a group called Fans of Aretha's Hat. When CNN's feed crashed under the weight of inauguration viewers, I raced to MSNBC to find their feed sputtering too. Fortunately, I was also "talking" via an email listserv, where someone broadcast that the NY Times feed was good, and it was, just in time to see the Queen of Soul sing, and talk about it on Facebook and Twitter, with so many others, friends.

There's a frenzy of tweeting on Twitter about the fowa, or Future of Web Apps, with many Twitter devotees proclaiming theirs is the app to end all apps, just like so many said of AIM all those years ago, but they're all really just that same pretty girl in a brand new dress, and she's got oh so many more new dresses to show us before she's old and tired, like the army of parents who've recently arrived on Facebook. We have met the future, and it is us.