By Garrison Fairfield

Over the past year I’ve fallen out of my man crush with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckeberg, mainly due to his lack of regard for his investors and his flip flopping mentality for Facebook’s privacy (privacy is his #1 concern unless he thinks he can make money by exploiting it, i.e. Beacon).  However he hit the nail on the head recently when he said that his goal was to allow users to “share themselves”.  I’m not a firm believer in web 3.0, I believe we are in web 2.5 right now.  Users now have the ability to go beyond social networking destinations and can now share themselves via their mobile devices (Twitter), throughout the web (social aggregators a la FriendFeed), and even from their desktops (Adobe Air).  However web 3.0 will be when these online community applications are so easy to navigate they can be used by my dad.

And even though many of these applications are unique and intriguing, they either lack the ubiquity or user friendliness in order to become a mainstream phenomena.

Twitter – Famous for its outages and can be one of the most frustrating applications you will ever work with.

FriendFeed – Simply too clunky for mass appeal, the groups section has helped out a lot, but they still need quite a bit of refinement.

Adobe Air – Unless I’m talking to industry colleague, the adoption of this downloadable application is still too small.  Eventually I see some of the most potential with this application, mainly due to the fact that Adobe is very determined to gain the same level of use from Adobe Air as the industry standard Adobe Flash Video Player.  And secondly because the UI (user interface) is fully open for development.  This means that a social aggregator could create an Adobe Air application that pulls in EVERY online social medium (facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter, friendfeed, et al) you utilize daily , and it all can be dynamically viewed and acted upon from your desktop.  Not to mention the fact that your social applications would not drain your web browser’s memory.

In a post today, Techcrunch’s Steve Gillmor said, “What social scientists are discovering is that sharing produces a better outcome than hoarding.”  And it’s this knowledge that is pushing innovation in the social space.  Services are being developed on a daily basis that will help users “share themselves” more effeciently.  Right now the social apps are great for early adopters, but we still have a long way to go our favorite online community services are adopted by our friends in the mainstream.