The Future is Social (It shared that with me)

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post a couple days ago on his popular blog called "Why Social Beats Search." In it, he alludes to Mike Arrington's post about the rise of automated content production and its effect on the larger content ecosystem. I encourage you to read both posts in their entirety and filter through the comments thread, but in the interest of brevity here's the nut from Fred's post, which is actually a part of a comment he left on Arrington's:

"social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t."

This has a lot do with what we're working on at Pinyadda and I think the point is worth commenting on. While we can complain about "information overload" as much as we want, and bemoan the emergence of hyper-velocity content production, the fact is that these things are here to stay. Ironically, the rise of machine-generation is leading many of us, Fred included, to use a large community of human entities (formerly known as "people") as a giant filter that helps us navigate this torrent of information.

Content is being produced at a volume and with a velocity never before seen by humankind. In the past, neither our social graphs nor any machine filters would have stood the test of the barrage. But digital social networks have made our graphs larger; their power more formidable. As these networks begin to make their utility felt, we're becoming more comfortable with the concept of sharing, moving beyond the perception of narcissism it once connoted. In this new ecosystem, sharing is not the cause of distraction and overload but the antidote; no longer the noise but the signal. A subset of the population has seen this transition coming, but the sea change is just now truly beginning.

The internet, having first rescued us from the relative drudgery of human-to-human content discovery ("no more asking librarians!" we screamed), has now thrown us back into each others' digitally enhanced arms, begging for the same sort of verification we used to get from our Dewey-Decimal-savvy friends ("can someone please tell me this is reliable?"). Search is still a good tool for some things and will continue to be so for a considerable time. But I have to agree with Fred's general philosophy that in the long term, the volume of content will make even the most advanced search a less effective tool than the social referral of our trusted sources. The great thing is that the internet is spawning new applications and platforms that allow us to leverage our social connections in more powerful ways than could ever have been imagined before.

So bring on the explosion of content. In the end, the result is more (and more powerful) human-to-human collaboration than we've ever seen. Make no doubt about it, this a the beginning of a revolution in how people find information and media, and it will be global, instantaneous, and inherently social.

What do you think about the future of content? Do you trust your social network to bring you relevant information, or do you think search and other technologies will continue to reign supreme? Let us know in the comments, or send me an email at austin[at]pinyadda[dot]com.