I tend to think that big companies are under the impression that the can either make content for web 2.0 or make infrastructure. Frankly, I think we got pretty lucky with dogspace, mostly people don’t want they're social networking to be too heavily reliant on any one company. As for being content: its a bit hit and miss. People (clients) seem to be under the impression that you can make something ‘go viral’ where as really all you can do is make something that you think follows the patter of what goes viral and hope for the best. Any number of things could stop it from being successful. For the second, they would rather belong to something who’s purpose it was to connect people (myspace, flickr, facebook) rather than to advertise one particular brand (dogspace, coke.com.au etc) at least by and large. Many many people try out these social sites, but in the end they USE facebook and myspace almost every day.
I think most companies havn’t yet realised that they can actually PARTICIPATE in this new web social space, rather than just hang on the peripheries. If fictional characters can have a web identity, why cant nokia or coke? Make a flikr page with photos that nokia took at gigs they had. Make the photos high res, and let people use them in mash ups. Why cant nokia licences something under creative commons? Have a facebook page. Have a myspace page, but don’t pretend that somehow this is ‘coke’ the person, make it clear its a bunch of the designers from coke, and that this is some of the things that they like. The ‘new’ web is about people interacting, but companies are still just kind of watching.
I’m excited by the possibilities (then again, I’m pretty geeky)
