"the core dual elements of future social applications: flow and traffic"

Really, really leveraging the interconnectedness potentiality in web apps:

We are sending all sorts of traffic -- different sorts of messages -- flowing through the various implicit and explicit social networks that we define ourselves through, and through which we discover meaning, belonging, and insight.

This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached -- for search and analysis purposes -- but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into.

Some good examples follow. Read the whole thing, as Instapundit would say.

/Message: Traffic And Flow

technorati tags:flow, traffic

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