Aggregated hubs or niche sites. What's the future?

Originally published on Kapuno in the Technology community

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Niche sites are popping up left and right to build hubs for their communities. HackerNews, StackOverflow and Geeklist (http://geekli.st) are creating a hubs for developers, LayerVault (http://news.layervault.com) just announced a solution for designers and, outside of technology, there are several organizations competing across the sciences and conservation. The further we move Tech/Design, the more “primitive” the technology supporting the endeavors.

History is a Great Teacher.

Whether we look at the invention of the car or the advent of mainstream social media innovation occurs through a cycle of niche progress and consolidation.

1. New market opportunities are signaled through niche solutions to the same underlying problem.

2. Aggregation product addressed the core problem with a generalized solution, consolidates the niche solutions by creating efficiencies for consumers.

3. New problems are created, see #1.

The rise of social media can be tracked back to the beginning of the internet and email in ‘71. Networks began with Usenet in ‘78, Geocities in ‘94 segmented users’ sites in to cities, AOL gave us profiles and friends but lacked the persistance of the status updates. More recently, Tribe, Friendster, MySpace and Facebook fought for identity and Facebook has, for the time being, won. Each product added a feature or found a simple assumption to get us to where we are.

When we look back at what Facebook has done — at the top of its achievements may be convincing hundreds of millions of people to feel comfortable sharing their ‘real-identity’ and who they are friends with in exchange for a simple way to consume updates from one another.

The ‘next big thing’ will include as simple a change in assumptions.

What if rather than expecting people to tell you who their friends are, we ask people what their passionate about?

Social Graphs by Interest and Context

Thinking of social and interest graphs as separate is a failure to understand what the graphs represent. Each graph represents the people who, in a specific context, are related to another. The people you’d bring a BBQ, who you’d invite to your wedding, who you’d go to a Geophysical Union conference with are all different networks although they may overlap.

As we’ve all realized when posting to a network, we ask “Will they be interested?” When we conflate our personal network with professional people we feel less comfortable talking about our day-to-day lives. When we are only personal we don’t necessarily feel comfortable talking about the latest news from our industry.

The future is taking the data and networks and creating a meta-network that sits above identity and allows us to distribute-content based on context. It will have an elegant solution that will address email, social, and interest-based distribution seamlessly.

Zé Future

At Kapuno Communities, we’re betting that the future of distribution is a world where communities create and collectively curate content. We have countless solutions that assume that following people is what’s going to solve the content-distribution problem. We’re focused on finding a way to create content-focused distribution channels that are segmented not by topic, but by the interests of the membership.

Further reading

I’ve attached an article that discusses this cycle with respect to the web services boom of 2007.