I think that we are at the verge of another online change. We are going from hyper global communities, to ultra local and even micro communities.
Global communities are places such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all other social networks which sole purpose is to get as many users on board as possible. They are doing well but have become significantly less helpful in the last couple of years. In other words, people find them too intrusive, to globalized and subjective to abuse. People add friends as maniacs for no apparent reason apart form increasing their rank and apparently popularity level – a number which often means nothing to anyone.
As a result of all of this, we see the emergency of hyper local communities where real relationships can be made; micro communities designed around very specific purposes with clearly defined goals. These communities matter as they are real. They are small but sometimes quite significant and influential.
Needless to say, hyper local and micro communities are more secure and less subjective to abuse. Simply put, when people know each other quite well a lot of technological and social related problems such as spam, fake identities, etc., become non-issues. They simple disappear. This is an interesting side-effect which worths further exploration.
