DIGITAL VERTIGO
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Even time itself, both the past and the future, is becoming social. Proust, a social network designed to store our memories, is trying—presumably in an attempt to emulate the eponymous French novelist—to socialize the past.137 There are “social discovery” engines like The Hotlist and Plancast that have aggregated information from over 100 million Web users that enables us to not only see where our friends have been and currently are located but also to predict where they will be in the future. There is even a social “intentionality” from the Ditto app that enables you to share what you will and should do with everyone on your network,138 while the WhereBerry social networking ser vice enables us to tell our friends what movies we want to see and restaurants that we’d like to try. But the social media revolution isn’t just about obscurely named start-ups— many of which, in today’s Darwinian struggle for digital domination, will inevitably fail. Take, for example, Microsoft, the former technology leader that is now trying to buy its way into the social economy. Microsoft’s intended $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, announced in May 2011—the company’s largest acquisition in its history—is an attempt to socialize its Internet business. This acquisition seeks to leverage Skype’s active 145 million users into a Microsoft centric social network that will maintain the company’s relevance in the social media age.139 Like Microsoft, every presocial technology company is now trying to surf the Emerald wave. Indeed, there are now so many social business products from large enterprises like IBM (Connections Social Soft ware), Monster. com (the Facebook app Beknown), and Salesforce (Yammer) that one analyst told the Wall Street Journal “it’s hard to think of a company that isn’t selling enterprise social soft ware now.”140 And the corporate world is embracing Web 3.0 technology, too, with “enlightened companies” such as Gatorade, Farmer’s Insurance, Domino’s Pizza, and Ford investing massively in social media marketing campaigns. “If you want to reach a millennium,” wrote one
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of Ford’s social media evangelists in a justification of why they sent a tweeting
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