How The Social Web Unlocked The Next Wave Of Startups: Personal Commerce
Today, if you ask a teenager if you should get Facebook, they’d probably laugh at you. “Facebook is so yesterday.” But Facebook in many ways has set a new standard for the web — by de-anonomysing it. Facebook in many ways is the starting point for the social web. You might not use it day to day for communications as much, but it’s often the central hub in which social presences are built from.
That figure is reflected in the below user graphs — which show that Facebook properties dominate the social user landscape.
In Internet-enabled societies today over 68% of people have a social media account of some kind.
Just think about that figure for a second. Two-thirds of all Internet users have a social media account of some form. The reach and scale of these networks is just staggering.
Despite this another trend comes in with an interesting tension — even though we spend more time with information on the social web, we also place far less trust in it. It doesn’t matter that we use it all the time. Information seen on social is never taken at face value.
This holds up when you look at how millennials (I hate that word — but it sticks for a broad categorisation of young people) trust less, generally speaking. When you’re primary information all comes from the web, with a range of sources, you’d probably be more skeptical as well.
Why does this happen? Becoming an author is now (basically) frictionless. There’s been huge growth in the volume of opinion online — and with more noise comes less truth.
Even reputable media publications now place more value on what’s shareable instead of what’s objective.
This gives us a stark truth: as authorship becomes easier, less trust is placed in authorship itself. Which in turn would imply that the web has created an environment where we trust less.
This is where the line of argument around ‘less trust’ ends.
Even though we now trust media less as a result of the web, the social web has also allowed us to place more trust in everyday people.
A shift has occurred: our trust in information has diminished but our trust in peer to peer services has increased.
In the age of social platforms it becomes far easier to receive information directly from your friends. The fact that so many young people now curate content from their friends, rather than an editor, is staggering. The ‘daily edition’ newspaper for young people isn’t the front page the New York Times — it’s their social media feed.
The more a company encourages social sharing, collaboration and connections, the more trust it builds. Being able to stay in a random stranger’s house (the entire premise of AirBnb) would never have been possible 20 years ago. Today, it’s entirely possible thanks to platforms designed to verify and automate the process of social proof.
The genius of companies like Uber and AirBnb is that they create that structure. By leveraging the massive social platforms of Facebook, Twitter and others they’re able to show people why they can trust one another. Verification becomes the brand in and of itself.
This has meant we’ve seen an inverse trend — we trust opinions through the social web less but we trust services provided by the social web more.
It explains a key trend that we’ve seen across the web in recent times (throughout the 2000s). The social web is enabling the fragmentation of markets into peer to peer — because it provides the frameworks to trust what the service your peer will be provide.
First, we had the rise of social media networks. Facebook’s, Twitter’s and others.
Then we had the rise of social messaging. SnapChat’s, WhatsApps and more.
Next we had (critically) the rise of social logins. Websites and existing services worked out it was easier to get you to click a button to login with your existing account.
The above meant that the social networks you were on shifted from being your central hub for connecting to friends to being your Internet Passport.
Finally, we saw the rise of peer to peer services like Uber, AirBnb and others which linked these networks into personal commerce. It explains why the current trend in market is in peer to peer platforms — and why these platforms are only arriving just now.
The social web has unlocked the peer to peer trust model. It’s made the Internet have less anonymity — and as a result, unlocked a range of services that couldn’t have previously existed.
What we’ll see next is the rise of ‘empty asset services’. Think of all the things you wouldn’t normally use day to day personally. Come 2020, you’ll probably be able to make a profit from them.
The next wave of startups won’t be social media. They’ll be those that unlock those empty assets — enabling and accelerating us into an age of personal commerce.
