Web 2.0 Is All About Social

It is no longer enough for a business to install the 'retweet' or the Facebook 'like' buttons on its site, was the big message from Silicon Valley at last week's annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Social networks have changed everything and now it is about the social experience and linking up with people you know, sharing opinions and information. When websites started we were all concerned about optimising content for search engines. Now, for every business, whether big or small is about how to make their site truly social and they need to think how they take the social ethos and tools of sites like Facebook and apply it to their own websites and not just focus on having a presence on a few key social sites.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook told the audience at the Web 2.0 conference that over the next five years almost every product vertical on the internet is going to be social and said that they should, "Get on the bus." He illustrated what he meant by using Facebook saying that when Facebook came along, it became a leader in social networking because it had the people and greater social elements so that users could really interact around the content.

Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, a social gaming company, well known for creating Farmville, knows the value of building within a social network and backups this latest thinking from the Web 2.0 conference as Pincus believes that the purpose of the web during its first 10 years of existence was about helping people find a deal and save money. He thinks the next 10 years of web 2.0 has the potential to offer more in aspects of culture and society. Pincus says, "The stage of the web is social. Every business both online and off needs to offer a social element and something fun. We live our lives online now."

It is not just websites that are just going social; things are about to change too with searching online. Currently, when we search on Google or any other search engine they only take into account what you are concerned with and the emphasis is on the individual. Now, Google and Bing are starting to develop ways to make your searching social, where your searching is influenced by your social context. Social context refers to friends, family and the virtual acquaintances you pay attention to online. Tom Stocky, a Manager at Google's search products, said, "Take the recent Wall Street movie. If a friend of yours blogged about it, chances are you will be more interested in that than a review by someone you don't know." Social context would get more important as people do more and more searching while they are out and about...I think that there is much power in being social on the web and can be a key agent for progress, change and business.

Photo Credit: Bull3t