The year of the social network
As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer has been arguing all summer that networking should be reopened — his June 2007 call to open up networking again framed closed social platforms as the problem. This column is the media-criticism companion piece: he watches the same trade press that hyped earlier waves now line up behind a new theme.
The pattern he names is long-lived — AI, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, and P2P each got their proclaimed year, and the mid-decade Web 2.0 wave was already being canonized in list form by outlets like TechCrunch in late 2005. His confirmed claim is that these proclamations exist primarily to help publications' ad sales, and the social network is simply the category currently worth selling.
First-order effects
- Tech publishers' editorial calendars and advertiser pitches converge on social networking for the coming year, so coverage of Facebook-class platforms gets framed as inevitability rather than as one contested design among several.
Second-order effects
- Startups rebrand around the social-network label to ride the theme and attract the ad budgets following it, while arguments like Winer's for opening networks compete for attention mainly where they fit the celebratory frame.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across AI through P2P, a category's proclaimed 'year' marks the point where it becomes a reliable advertising vehicle for trade press — making the proclamations a lagging indicator of commercial maturity, not a forecast of technical arrival.
The trend: Trade-press 'year of X' proclamations have become a recurring signal of when a computing category turns into an ad-sales engine rather than when its underlying technology actually works.