Facebook, and ‘The Social Network’

I picked up a 2-pack of Time magazines in the Tokyo airport on our way to Europe recently to tide me over the 11 hour flight to Copenhagen. The magazines were wrapped together, back to back in clear cellophane with covers facing out on either side. The current front cover (Aug. 1 & 8 2011 issue) was titled ‘Traveling Through Islam’. The back magazine was an old issue from 27 Dec. 2010/03 Jan. 2011 titled ‘Person of the Year’.

It’s a good thing I missed this issue 8 months ago. In Dec. 2010, I had already decided that I was going to have a website built, but in reality knew very little about the web. I had hired a small firm to begin building it in Oct. of that year, and had been working with one individual from that company mainly on the design.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m on my second web coder/designer. He’s a thousand times better than the first (he may even be reading this), and the website is getting closer to being fully operational. And, in the 10 months leading up to now, I’ve learned more about the web than I had in the previous 10 years.

One thing I’ve learned is that the web we all currently know today is still what some people consider a cold place to navigate. Outside of Facebook and with only a few exceptions, we visit
websites all alone, without any real person to interact with. Increasingly this is changing I find, as I've had live people ready to chat with me when attempting to purchase a server for the site from companies offering the service. Facebook in seven short years has fully transformed the way we communicate with each other online. Companies are hot in pursuit to change this, but the present availability of technology still doesn’t fully support experiences on the web such as fully functional virtual reality.

The social web seems to be the wave of the future. Creating a social experience on my website will be the biggest challenge early on. Making high quality content without a plan of distributing it across the web properly and efficiently to those who are interested in it is like being dead in the water before you’ve crawled out of it.

Innovative ideas are one thing, but a solid, well-written business plan is another.

Keep the faith.