Mining our internet social circles

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Network Cables / Flickr photo by pascal.charest

The internet is all about social these days, it has been for sometime, and as more of us become more active on the major social networking sites it’s becoming increasingly apparent that although our number of ‘friends’, ‘followers’ or ‘connections’ can be huge, the opportunities for us each to leverage the intelligence that’s locked away in the minds of our contacts are minimal.

The travel space is one area that everyone can contribute expertise to and there are no shortage of websites that play on this fact in an effort to increase the diffusion of local knowledge, and connect travellers to those who have answers to their questions.  Tripbod and Travellr are often cited as two of our favorites.

Extensive integration with the big networks required

The ability to spread local knowledge through sites like these is still very much hindered by their isolation from the social circles that we create for ourselves online though.  The early status update idea has transformed into micro-blogging that makes interacting online a quite seamless and open experience.  The local travel movement (as championed by the likes of whl.travel, Spotted by Locals, Tripbod and Going Local) is begging for us to see knowledge sharing websites that integrate with the obscene amounts of global intelligence available through our extended social networks, and operate in a similar way.

Not everyone can be a social networking site

Travellr has started to open the door on connecting travel questions and answers with other networks, it is a fantastic site with a great look and feel but still relies on users inputting the standard social network information into a new profile on the Travellr site.  Social networking has been cracked, and although a vast amount of startups have contributed to its innovation, it is a numbers game in which Facebook, Google, Twitter and Linked-in hold the cards and can therefore cherry pick the best ideas.

A huge untapped resource

Other sites that are looking beyond creating niche communities and providing a global service need to accept that users don’t want to build new networks all over the web, and they need to begin looking at how they can integrate with the major social networking players and leverage the information already shared, much of which is not being used in any intelligent way.

Google purchases question and answer site

The recent purchase of Aardvark by Google is an indicator that Google understands what needs to happen in this space, and the potential that exists.  It will probably eventually release another new tool that will blow all of these smaller local travel knowledge enterprises out of the water in the same way that it has with Google Buzz.  The addition of personalised social results to the Google search pages is a step in this direction.  The ability of a company to innovate and execute an idea technologically these days limits their success amongst the giants, even if the idea is a good one.