Is a new wave of relevance-based networks emerging?
June 3rd, 2007 by Nadja
At Reboot - the yearly international meet-up for visionary inventors, philosophers, tech-geeks and interdisciplinary thinkers - JaiKu-inventor Juri Engeström presented this slide.
It shows the fast-blooming-and-dying-cycles of webnetworks that have succeeded in spreading rapidly by having people connect and link to one-another - but eventually die out because they fail to offer a relevant focus/obejct/reason for the network to network to exist and evolve.
Networking, connecting and flashing your sprawling buddy-list apparantly wont do the trick in itself. It takes some substance, theme, common ground - reason - to make it worthwhile.
Luckily it seems that a new wave of web-networks that focus on relevance, knowledge and human need are allready emerging. Networks that aren’t about showing off who you know (or wish you knew) but about actual knowledgesharing, real-life-connecting and co-creating something important, beautiful or inspiring for everyone to benefit from.
And I welcome that very much. Let’s use the new opportunities to help people from the diaspora find eachother and reconnect. Let’s give serendipity a helping hand when travelling. And let’s create platforms that allow us to explore eachothers fields of knowledge, minds… or brainwaves.
Don’t you think there’s a good chance such networks would be more viable than the broken wave-cycles pictured above?
2 Responses to “Is a new wave of relevance-based networks emerging?”
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I’ve been wondering what people get out of these fast growing networks. I’ve ventured out and asked some people and that some of the connections and networks result in work offers, and another found an easy mechanism for viral reserach. I like your idea about knowledge sharing and co-creating. I do have a question of living to the brand created by our network profile.
@ Nikki - I’ve quite the sceptic myself for a while when it comes to virtual networks. But I’ve eventually given in and I’m actually having a lot of fun using Facebook and the other networks.
I think it differs quite a lot what people use it for - and personally I’ve re-met a lot of people that I didn’t realize I missed - but am very happy to be reconnected with. I probably would have lived happily ever after without it and yes - it does consume quite a lot of time. But then again…maybe we, as adults, play too rarely and meet new people (or reconnect with those doing something else than we do) too rarely. So if the networks can help us play a bit more I think that’s quite an achievement too.
Could you elaborate a bit on your last question? I’m not quite sure what the question is - is it whether it’s a problem to be as cool in real life as ones network profile portrays?