Do you know what Cowbird, Stylitics and Ravelry have in common?

The answer is they are all highly interest-centric social networks, and the chances are you’ve heard of them! Cowbird.com is a community of passionate story-tellers, Stylitics.com is a network for sharing and discovering fashion items and Ravelry.com is a network of people who are into…knitting.

The world of social networks is proliferating. Fast. Read more on Thinking small again…

Initially, early social networks (including Facebook and LinkedIn) revolved around connecting people via their ‘social graphs’. 2011′s winners were platforms and ideas originating from, supporting, and at times enabling, the formation of relationships around shared ‘interests’. This makes perfect sense, for it is less important how you know someone than how relevant this person is to the conversation.

The wide spread conversations on the Japanese earthquake, the Royal Wedding or the protests in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street did not revolve around people ‘knowing’ each other per se, but on the shared ‘interest’ people had in the events. The London riots did not spread via actual relationships between the different groups and individuals but around a (foul) concept. Yes – human interests, just like marketing communications that leverage social media, contain the good, the bad and the ugly. Read more on The year of shared interests – the good, the bad and the ugly…

While working on developing what could be the operating system of the future agency, I was fortunate to stumble upon three talks, given at Google’s Firestarters in London. I would like to share my thoughts on what the future OS of an agency should sprout from based on my work and enhanced by these talks. Read more on What is the operating system of the future agency?…