Crastinate

It was only a few years ago that our virtual identities were spread out amongst separate and unaffiliated networks. You had a profile on Facebook which had no connection to your business profile on LinkedIn which had no connection to your blog on Blogger.

Jump to the present and we’ve got Facebook Connect, Google Connect, and a required mandate for every company to have APIs that give access to their users’ info off their site. Information between services is starting to be shared.

The question with all this is where are we going? What will the web look like in five years and how and where will we manage our digital identities? Is there a model we can look at to give us a sneak peek into the future? I’m glad you asked because there is. It’s called Instant Messaging.

While people had been chatting on IRC and dial-up message boards for years, instant messaging only became mainstream with AOL. For those who can remember, at the time AOL was a closed network for those who paid the cost-per-minute charges. All the cool people were on AOL. Sure you can chat on IRC, or via ICQ, but if you wanted to chat with all your friends, you paid for AOL. AOL eventually opened up their chat to everyone but the worlds of chat were still separate. The big players, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all had their own networks and weren’t willing to collaborate. The way the instant messaging networks used to be set up should look familiar to you.

Eventually, based on start-ups pushing the boundaries and consumer demand, an integration of the chat networks was suddenly possible. The big three had opened up their networks to the world. While you may sign up for an AOL screen name now, or a Google talk screen name, you can talk to anyone on any network regardless of where you signed up.

In some ways, where you sign up doesn’t make a difference. What defines your personal chat experience is the software you use to chat, not the network that you used to be tethered to. Are you an Adium or an iChat mood today? Do you feel like the AIM, Gtalk, or Digsby interface today? The software, with it’s pros and cons, is what defines your chat experience. Because transitioning from one chat program to another takes minutes, developers are under constant pressure to provide the best product in the market. The power is now fully in the hands of the consumers.

If we apply this logic to our current situation, here is what we’re looking at in the coming years.

All our social identities will be accessible from any access point. With a click of a button, all our Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Twitter, Google, etc. info can be integrated into whatever interface or service we choose. The services that provide the best user experience will win the consumer’s pageviews. We already see that happening with twitter clients. Some people like Tweetdeck while others prefer Tweetie. It’s all a matter of preference. The winners of all this will be the consumers. We will get more personalized attention to our needs than ever before. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. So when someone tells you that the future of the web can’t be predicted, give them a history lesson.

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Have you ever taken a technology vacation? What I mean by that is have you ever disconnected yourself completely from your digital lives? No email, no Facebook, no RSS feeds, no internet at all? I haven’t done it in a few years but from what I do remember from that vacation I took (it was while I was in Scotland) is that it helped me focus when I came back. When I returned I realized that the world had not fallen apart and I didn’t really miss that much even though I was offline for almost two weeks.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day and we forget why we do the things we do to begin with. This scenario is analogous to the online marketing world presented before us today. The daily evolving world of social media has taken over our lives. Everything we do, from getting food (find the menu on Menupages, order from Seamlessweb, review on Yelp) to walking the street (check Google maps for where that bar is, check-in with FourSquare, I’m the mayor!) has become a social web experience.

The marketing world, trying to keep up, has put most of its attention on getting their content in the social stream. Getting users to share their content is the ultimate goal of any current marketer. Is this the right approach?

I’ll be attending a unique conference this week created by well-known video blogger and web 2.0 personality Loren Feldman. The Audience Conference dares us to disconnect from our world of sharing and asks us to focus on the quality list of speakers and presentations at hand. Laptops are discouraged (if not banned). There won’t be any official live blogging. There won’t be a live feed. The goal is not to share this conference but to experience it like we used to experience things before the online social explosion.

Focusing on our audience is something that us marketers might have lost over the past few years (if we ever really had it to begin with). Going back to basics may be the best way to solve this problem. There are still a few seats left at The Audience Conference if you have an interest in going.

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