Various forms of Social Media

Social Media is freely used to describe many apps that enable user generated content. Most significant of them being web logs, or blogs, which started it all. Others, include, podcasting of both audio and video, social networking apps, wikis, photo sharing sites like flickr etc...

But what should really be considered a social media platform? In addition to orchestration, one should be able to create and publish all basic content types and their possible combinations to enable each user to become a media powerhouse with relative ease. Furthermore, the platform should adhere to fundamentals of social media mentioned in my previous post.

Who does this today? None, but MySpace comes close, and the others like Google, and traditional media companies like nbc.com etc would eventually move aggressively on this. indiainteracts.com is surely working towards this goal.

Who will win this race? I think its hard for a traditional web 1.0 company to acquire a web 2.0 and meaningfully orchestrate the result for many reasons.

Converting their existing architecture to the web 2.0 format, which is technically difficult, but the most difficult is actually killing their 1.0 business model to adopt a new model which is still sketchy in its monetization details.

Surely building ground up for this would be easier and less expensive and surely VCs are in the prowl for such a company which will truly disrupt the current media model.