Those of us who were lucky enough to be a part of building Web 1.0 often talked of an idealistic future in which the Internet would smash geographical and political borders, allowing people to unite into communities of interest in the new, open-source, freewheeling, marketplace-of-ideas that was to be the New Techtopia. One of the observations most people made was how small communities–everything from say, Pez dispenser collectors to Jane Austen fans (and yes, the strangest sexual fetishists and and other bizarre-underbelly-of-the-Web communities) could aggregate together on a global scale to bring people together who normally wouldn’t be able to find each other on a local scale.
It wasn’t until around 2004 when Chris Anderson gave this effect a name, the Long Tail, and a new buzzword was born that was sure to make its way into a dizzying number of Silicon Valley business plans and PowerPoint decks.
A trend that’s just begun, and that I expect to keep growing, is something I’m going to call it the Local Long Tail — the ability for social technology to organize these geographically-situated, long-tail communities within urban centers.
Here are the trends driving this effect, as I see it:
- Large urban centers have the population scale and the access to transportation that makes it easy for people to gather in-the-flesh. As energy costs drive the cost of travel up, and access to jobs in rural regions gets even harder, we’ll see more and more people continue to flock to urban living (interesting link: check how much of your country lives in an urban area).
- A trend toward an experience-based economy from a predominantly product-consumer economy means that media consumption, social networking, and meeting and interacting with people to share and celebrate in experiences–things that give value, collective memory and social status beyond the worth of a purchased object–will drive the adoption of social technology that helps it happen.
- The explosion of advanced mobile electronics like the iPhone that create new intersections between social-networking and location-sensitive capabilities (think of Twinkle and Urban Spoon writ large).
- The recent emergence of new forms of entertainment such as Alternate Reality Games and Augmented Reality Games that (often, in the former; always in the latter) rely upon realspace-meets-cyberspace.
- A general desire for people in general to connect in real-life with the people they meet online. Look for a lot more things in the spirit of TweetUps, LAN Parties, and Adult Friend Finder.
What an amazing time to be alive.
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