Thoughts, Ideas, Opinions ... » Involve Me, and I'll contribute

According to Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service, social networks are now more popular than search engines in the UK.

Although it might be argued that the report is not exactly comparing apples with apples, I see it as another interesting indication demonstrating the evolution of the Internet and the way users are engaging.

In the past decade, the world wide web has served its propose as a de facto tool for research and many other information gathering activities. In fact, some of us might still be old enough to remember the painstaking experience of spending hours or days at the local or university library doing research for a paper; the Internet could be the best thing technology has brought to our daily lives.

However, the days when consumers are using the Internet purely for one-dimensional information gathering are on their way out. To many (including the generation who has never lived without a computer or the Web), they expect a lot more from technology…

Perhaps it is not surprising to hear about Yahoo’s extended partnership with Facebook, the search company’s latest attempt to provide deeper integration with the social networking site. Internet users now demand two-dimensional interactions when it comes to receiving information, either from friends or people they trust or share a passion with through social networks.

With this new evolution of using the Web, information and content is still king, but instead of just receiving and absorbing information passively, it is an ‘information exchange’ where general users have the power to be part of the collective intelligence. For example, users can add, amend and request to remove a certain piece of information on Wikipedia.  

Opinions are no longer a privilege of a small group of people, everyone is entitled to their opinions and via reviews and ranking features on most websites, they can express them. A good example is a user-generated content site called Qype where users recommend and review shops, restaurants, bars, gigs and services based on their personal experiences.

We are entering a world where information is truly available to everyone, not only as a one-way reference, but also as a collective intellect built upon conversations and discussions among the general public via websites, forums, blogs and social networks.

As is often the case in technology adoption, consumers are leading here, but the revolution will be even bigger on the corporate side as companies discover that the elusive knowledge management that they have always been craving for will not be driven by powerful search on douments but by the ability to engage employees in contributing to conversations that can then evolve in proper innovation. People and their ideas are back to the center, documents are the back-up, the mean, the output, but certainly not where it starts and getting this process started is the difficult part.That will be the topic of one of my next posts.