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Web 2.0 Expo Reveals: Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies

Remember, you read it here first. Wolfe’s three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future. These catchy Web 2.0 catch-phrases popped into my head during a heavy week of session-sitting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here’s why I’m optimistic that those of us who are ready to embrace the virtual future are going to be in for a fun ride.

These aphorisms are part of my attempt to make sense of the rapidly shifting playing field, in which those of us who’ve spent the last several years ramping up our blogging efforts — and patting ourselves on the virtual back for being in the forefront of the new-media revolution — find all of a sudden that we’re no longer quite so cutting edge.

Nope, that title would go to the folks who’ve put together the powerhouses that are the online social networks. I’m talking about sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 (the latter is the Spanish-speaking world’s popular destination.) Hence my first new-age Web law:

Social networks are the new media companies.

Only a few months ago, I was mightily perplexed by the popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace. However, I figured that, after people grew tired of farting around with pictures or movie quizzes (or, for MySpace users, when they reached puberty), they’d move on to “real” sites. You know, sites like this one.

Savvily, the people at Facebook, MySpace et al, appear to have thought of this, too. And they’ve got a solution. They’ve opened up their social networks to developers, who can build their own apps and post them so users can put them on their own FB and MS pages. There’s even an open API for developers, called OpenSocial, which most of the social nets are supporting, to a greater or lesser extent.

There’s another wrinkle, which is that developers can put their own ads inside the social-net apps they build. This is a method of monetizing one’s social-app, akin to whatGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG) allows when you drive traffic from your Web site to its Ad-Sense advertisements.

So now kids in Kansas or moms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have the tools (OpenSocial) and the incentive (ads) to build FB and MS apps. Scarily, for the Time-Warners of the world, there’s nothing to keep these table-top developers for building apps which are more popular and attract more users those from the big guys.

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