Monday, July 02, 2007

Marc Andreessen, lovin' on social networks

I think this is a good post, not so much because of Ning itself, but because Marc sees what's happening here. (But you don't know what that is, do you, Mr. Jones?)

Why Ning?: "After 12 years of experimentation, when I and a lot of other people tried a lot of experiments to try to figure out how people everywhere were really going to use this marvelous collective invention, I think it's becoming crystal clear what some of the defining characteristics of the Internet really are.

Giving people the ability to communicate in many new ways -- making geography finally irrelevant.

Giving people the ability to express themselves in many new ways -- the impact of the printing press, magnified a millionfold.

Giving people the ability to create their own worlds for everything they care about -- and connecting with everyone else who shares the same interests, goals, and dreams.

These are things that previous technology and media -- telephone, telegraph, paper mail, fax, television, radio, newspapers, magazine -- occasionally approached in sharply limited and fragmented ways... but now with the Internet are available to over a billion people worldwide already and a lot more every day.

And I think that over the next several years we are going to see an unleashing of creativity and innovation in this realm that will make the 1990's look like a sideshow act.

It's a magical time, and I couldn't be more fired up to be a part of it."



(Via blog.pmarca.com.)



The question for me is, with all these wonderful tools, will it change the way people behave? (Both individually and as a global society.)

I'd love to see our world get some basic project management and architectural abilities:
- identify major sources of risk and ways to evaluate and mitigate those risks
- define goals - what the hell you want to accomplish
- understand implications and future effects of things we are planning to do, and things that are already part of the system

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