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I posted a comment over on TechCrunch that sums up a lot of what I’ve saying to people in person or on Twitter the past few weeks about FriendFeed. Several applications have, of late, risen to prominence that have taken the promise given to us by RSS and improved upon it. A few of those focus simply on taking the concept of content and flipping it around to being person-focused; instead of subscribing to a blog, I subscribe to a person. Examples include Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Other applications have gone one step further. They don’t (intially) offer you the ability to create content, but rather to collect (aggregate) your own content and make it discoverable via your identity (rather than a blog/brand). FriendFeed is the best example. This is RSS subscription, but you subscribe to a person, not a feed.

We have, right now, embraced the social applications idea. Blogs became just another form of media, not the personal avatar on the web, as Richard MacManus called them many years ago. The future is systems like Facebook and FriendFeed (Twitter, despite its obscene limitations on content, is building a powerful social network that could destroy FriendFeed in an instant if they chose to move in that direction).

It’s a final recognition that the web is made of people, not content.

In checking out the other sponsors for Thursday’s TECH Cocktail DC, I was introduced to Wine Library TV. I’m not a huge wine drinker (I’m more of a scotch guy), but I find myself very intrigued by the show, which is done extremely well; the host, Gary Vaynerchuck, shows great enthusiasm and really makes a topic I wouldn’t normally be interested in compelling. There’s even a whole episode devoted to kosher wines!

And today I noticed that Cork’d, a niche social network for wine-lovers, was acquired by Wine Library TV. The combination of original content, user-generated content, social networking and, most importantly, high-end products that cater to high-income demographics, seems like a good combination. I’d bet that something like this would work for scotch, cigars, maybe even beer (putting aside the issues with selling this stuff online, which can be tricky). It’s nice to see a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

Alex Krupp: Is Social Networking Dead? Nope. Read his post, it’s right on the money.

I’ve often used, as an example of this, a site that was a social network before everyone was talking about social networks. The site is called OnlySimchas.com, it’s the king of the Jewish web world, 2.0 or otherwise. It’s a site that lets people share an announcement of a happy occasion, such as an engagement, wedding, bar mitzvah, new baby, by posting photos and leaving comments. It’s become an obsession and a part of life of the Jewish world, to the point where many people now hear about engagements of close friends and even family via the site.Â

Why does it work? It works, not because it’s focused on a niche, which it is, but because it pays attention to a very specific social interaction common to that niche (namely, the age-old Jewish tradition to shep nachas, or, in other words, to share the joy of a happy occasion), and augments with the capabilities of the medium of the web. Just creating “Facebook for Jews” (which others have tried) hasn’t and won’t yield the same results. If all you’re doing is recreating an existing social network with an added feature, or doing a niche-clone, there’s plenty of open source or commercial projects you can use, and you shouldn’t need to raise venture capital for something like that.

A few weeks back, the Social Media Club came to town, and a good discussion was had on the nature of social media. I love these kinds of discussions, mostly because I enjoy how my opinion changes as the conversation progresses (a sure sign I’m learning something). Towards the end of the night, I think I got what the phrase social media means (or, should mean, in contradistinction to other terms).

Many like to conflate social media with amateur media; because when we think of social media we think of blogs and YouTube, the inclination is to associate social media with media that is produced by non-established entities. I don’t think the origin of the media has anything to do with its social status. The social component of social media is in how the media is distributed and shared, not in how it is created. As an example, I can share a professionally produced, fully copyrighted video clip from The Daily Show on YouTube, or post a link to an O.A.R. single on my blog (I say I “can” do these things, to which I mean I can do them technically, not legally). If I were to buy this media as a CD or DVD, they wouldn’t be considered social media, but by posting them online, I’ve changed how I share them with others. People who find that content will be doing so outside of the traditional structures of media promotion (i.e. - they won’t be getting the content from a major network or radio station).

This has important ramifications to how we view social media. Social media is not an innovation in technology, although technology certainly facilitates it’s expedience. Instead, social media is a change in the areas of marketing and distribution. The reason why blogs, online video sharing and others are considered social media is not because the content is produced by amateurs, but because we become aware of what content is important and worth paying attention to in a social fashion. Despite the fact that we consider it an innovation, social media could be viewed as a technical formalization of much of what has been taking place in the word-of-mouth marketing and PR camps over the past several years (hence the overwhelming concentration of PR people at the Social Media Club), and on an even more basic level, the act of sharing something you like with a friend.

What reminded me to write this was Scott Karp’s recent post entitled “A Lot of User-Generated Content is Really User-Appropriated Content.” I think the term “user-generated content”, besides giving me a headache, has been misappropriated as the reason for the success of sites like YouTube. Never mind the fact that the professionally generated content created most of the draw, but the other aspect that made YouTube take off was the social nature of the content, the fact that it was shared and the members of the site helped determine what was worth paying attention to, not the marketing or PR departments.