I often chat with my UK colleauge, Ben Bose– who happens to be one of our most brilliant, and we often get to chatting. I thought I’d share:

me: when i say ‘the web is social’ people look at me strangely

i think marketing people dont like it
well, digital agencies
will nod and say yes!
but if they REALLY accepted it
it has much broader, fundamental impacts on the BUSINESS of digital agency
than the industry is willing to admit or change at the moment

Ben: You should see the looks we get here! Absolutely!
It’s all about products, and business.
The web is social.
The web is not an add-on.

me: right, well and the current approach to the web is fairly siloed…especially if you consider that ‘social media’ is considered a channel and not the state of the web itself (by most marketers)

Ben: Indeed.

me: there’s still a lack of adoption industry-wide of the paradigm shift from a web of pages to a web of applications

Ben: We had a deck flying around recently from another company.
It dealt with their web strategy.
Drove me up the wall – a spokes diagram with words like “social media” and “synergy”.
Grrrr.

Mark H. over here has a nice paradigm of the web.
He doesn’t believe in sites, just pages.
So the web is constructed per individual, based on their experiences.
I doubt I’m explaining it well.

me: no i know what he is saying
i don’t believe in a ‘sites’ paradigm either, but would not necessarily a ‘pages’ one either

i would offer a web paradigm of streams

rather than pages

Ben: Interesting….

me: my personlized web experience is really one of streams
both fragmented and aggregated
not in pages themselves….but in the actions i take on the web
it is those actions that live beyond pages and can live simultaneously was well
this becomes apparent with examples like FriendFeed
but even beyond that
i think we will begin to see our ‘life streams’, if you will, in browser functionality perhaps

Ben: With things like Ubiquity?

me: sure
and perhaps Chrome
Goog’s play into the browser is more than a browser war,
its an-access-to-data war
data=streams

Ben: What do you think of Chrome?

me: or rather,
streams=data

i haven’t used it yet…i have a mac