Young people have millions of channels to chose from. How do they navigate them? Is it all that Ritalin we give them? Actually, it’s all about networking, the wisdom of crowds. Friends recommend cool things to one another–saving time and creating shared experiences (for more on this tendency, read Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? from the New York Time Magazine). Studies show that nearly all teens like to tell their friends about the things they discover on the web. For them, this means text, IM, SNS profiles, blogs…and now web browsers.
As the internet becomes a gathering place as much as a research tool, the next generation of browsers meld socializing with discovery. The first wave of services such as Diigo, StumbleUpon, and TrailFire began as Firefox add-ons, integrating social functionality into the browser. Now social search is built into the browser.
- Buddywave brings MySpace into Windows’ browser. BuddyWave has built in two main tools: an instant messenger-like friends list manager as well as an Ajax tool for editing your profile.
- Me.dium’s sidebar reveals the people using the same website and locates friends on the web.
Think of it as StumbleUpon in real-time with added social features.
- Flock and The Coop are the newest of the bunch. Both bring your SNS friends into a sidebar of Firefox, making to easy to share content with them. Eventually you can drag and drop content into their avatar!
- MyBlogLog forms communities of a blog’s readers. Recently bought by Yahoo!, it began as a simple widget that bloggers put on their page. Like SNS in a box.
When a teen subscribes to a collection of feeds, publishes a blog, puts a tag on a post, tells a friend about a video they are functioning as a network. These social browsers will take this functionality a step further, creating more cohesive and streamlined systems of information exchange.
Now, brands must go through these influential networks, what we call Spheres of Influence–and credibly–as they move from first-to-market to mass-market.
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