Yeah, I agree. In fact, the more I’ve looked at this post, the more I have been thinking the phrase I should have used was The Real “Enabling” Force behind social media.

Even that, of course, doesn’t do it justice. The true enabling will take place when management allows and encourages staff to pursue the conversations.

You can have the platforms and technologies, but if management won’t let you use them … well, they are useless to you.

Thanks.

Robert

While I truly admire the geeks behind all this, I personally believe that the real driving force behind social media are the people that use it.

Technologies, platforms and the like will come and go, but innovation is a constant, abuse of and boredom with the platform du jour are inevitible, and people will always migrate to the next great thing.

This isn’t about advances in technology; it’s about an evolution in human behavior that’s being enabled by technology. And the behavioral evolution is both seismic and permanent.

RWM

Facebook’s Harvard sophomore (now dropout) Mark Zuckerberg is a terrific illustration. He, too, was just tinkering to create a tool for his friends and that led to the site everyone seems to want to own (or participate in), these days.

Digg is good, too. Kevin Rose was 27 when he launched Digg in Dec. 2004. He spent $200 to hire a PHP programmer in order to begin the site. Today it rivals SlashDot and draws in millions. Very social.

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone “…also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious.” Stone is 33 today, so he was in his 20′s when getting started. That’s a great example, too. Evan Williams (27 when co-founding Pyra labs) also co-founded Twitter and Blogger.

Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs (Blogger) and co-founded Kinja. She’s young, too, at 35. Pyra Labs was founded in 1999. So, she was in her late 20′s.

Flickr, another good example of social media. The founders were sorta young. Caterina Fake, 37, and her Web designer husband Stewart Butterfield, 33, where in their late 20s, early 30s, when Flickr launched.

Two more great examples … 6A’s Mena and Ben Trott were both born in 1977 and founded Six Apart in 2001. So, they were in their early/mid 20′s at the beginning of their efforts.

75,800 sites running Drupal isn’t necessarily a large number in comparison to others, but sites like The Onion and the United Nation’s End Poverty campaign reveal the depth and breadth of their impact. Check out Dries’ site and you’ll see that all kinds of interactive efforts, from Playboy, MTV, Sony and Ubuntu to Hillary Clinton, are all using Drupal. Drupal is in school sites, news sites (consumer generated to traditional old media). These are all interactive, in their own ways. I think the scope of Drupal’s impact is a bit hidden. Also, if it weren’t for Drupal, would we have CivicSpace and the other political / grassroots iterations? I don’t know.

Rusty Weston
My Global Career
http://www.myglobalcareer.com

Looked at the site and it is VERY social and media driven, indeed. A kind of mob-gaming or mob-fun?

The Light Saber and Pillow Fight seem fun, but maybe dangerous.

Comments show very clearly which events are a success or crash-n-burn.

Given the audiences and how many are already participating, you could be right. This could catch on … the next dodgeball?

The more I think about this, it would make a great cinéma vérité type of story. Lifetime, A&E … not reality TV, because it deserves better. Some program that would follow several events and then do an hour … that would be great.

Their work is VERY social, VERY media-driven and influenced, but NOT tech-related,like the choices you name (quite sensibly) in the post. I think they are brilliant.

http://www.newmindspace.com/