I have this theory. It's been coming to me over the last several months, growing the while as it matures like a wine or cheese, gathering subtle flavours. My theory is this. Anything happening on the internet, whatever the site sets out to be, there will be an inevitable slide towards an amalgamation of all things. People running a site, say, to provide back links to other websites for their owners, might at some point when they have a moment to think, wonder if it might be a good idea to have a forum...
A proper forum is something that increasingly is seen as necessary for just about any site, as well as a blog, because, as we all know, bots love content [what do bots love? CONTENT!]. ;-)
So, this site that promotes links, has a forum, but no forum is worth the name without all that a forum is, which means gizmos/tools/gadgets - which once were little snips of code that did some clever thing, but these days are more likely to create a whole virtual world to play in, something else to offer the visitors to your 'page' or site.
This place [I know, we aren't supposed to talk about the big Q, but please don't reject this because of that] has a forum, which I wasn't even aware of until invited to join it
here http://qassia.ning.com. But it isn't just a forum, oh no, you can have all manner of gadgets attached to your member page, you can invite people in to play, it is, in short, morphing into a social networking site, I spot similarities here and there, the chrysalis is almost a butterfly.
So, you can choose one of these great OpenSocial gadgets to add to your profile page [only one???], I've chosen Unype Virtual World which is a virtual world, like Second Life, that runs inside Google Earth. So now we have Google Earth, a truly astounding, real world geography tools par excellence morphing into a social networking website [and it already has the ability to become a flight simulator as I've explained in another intel].
So the forum here is already in the act of becoming a social networking site, as are so many other, utterly different sites. You can sign up for one service and suddenly find yourself in a strange place where everyone appears to be 15 years old and know each other, has the most groovy pages which animate, play music and videos, and they all have thousands of 'friends' who regularly drop by to leave messages. It's like a giant cyber drop shop, and there are billions of them all over the planet.
The morphing is gathering pace, driven by everyone's desire to be noticed in an increasingly complex, overcrowded and impersonal world, and there's no plan, just an organic evolution from the simple idea of a website - pages of text and pictures either teaching, selling, advertising or proselytising - into an amorphous beast that is all things to all surfers. Stop here and you never have to leave, seems to be the unspoken message. McCluhan said 'the medium is the message' and that has never been truer than when applied to the internet, this fantasy world of zeros and ones stored on countless hard discs across the planetary surface, a network much like the neuron network in the brain, perhaps a global brain is indeed emerging or evolving... but what kind of brain is it?
