Social Media and Social Gaming

The Social Media and Social Gaming channels are some of our more popular, and reinvigorating, channels.

Why reinvigorating?

Because it is all still such a new field, it catalyzes people to actually think and come up with new ideas. Often WILD new ideas. Often new perspectives on old ideas. This is all quite invigorating and stimulating.

This kind of brainstorming will wither and die a horrible death as things settle into 1 to 3 major players doing all the thinking - and making all the money - for us. These major players are then invested in the status quo, so any thinking they do after that is about how to keep things as they are. I.E. it all becomes quite boring.

An example, and examples are numerous, for software people reading this was the Object-Orientation revolution. The number of ideas coming out of conferences like late 80s, early 90s OOPSLA were just staggering and wonderful. Then C++ captured the majority of the market and then Java in 96 [the much better C++], and well, that was that. We don't even have an OO channel.

So who will capture the social landscape? Can it be dominated by a player. Are we going to see serial domination? FreindFinder to MySpace to FaceBook to...? [I think yes].

Gaming does not seem to have a single player dominating the field - not since maybe Atari. Does Social Gaming care what platform it is on? If it does will the next big social network DESIGNED to support social gaming from the get-go going to be the next Big Social Thing? [Could well be]