A key trend for 2009: Conversation Enablement

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

A recent blog post by Seth Godin got me thinking about the power of Conversation Enablement and the idea of Social Books. Seth wrote about his vision of a conversation-enabled Amazon Kindle, egging me on to contemplate this: isn't Conversation Enablement something that already drives a lot of the most successful ideas, services and platforms, and isn't this very likely to explode in a financially-ultra-tight 2009:

• Twitter is really all about enabling a constant river (well... ocean, really) of conversation. The driving force is not really the linked-to information but the Context, and the Conversation that ensues as a consequence
• The iPod touch and maybe even the new Zune (and other connected music devices) are all about enabling conversations - they connect us to the content, but also to each other. Some people would argue that the each-other component is the part that will soon generate more revenues than the content, itself ;)
• The most successful mobile apps (Pandora and Last.fm for music, the NYT and AP mobile apps, Facebook, Google reader, Loopt) etc are also heavily into enabling conversation around the content
• Almost ALL of the companies that had huge growth in 2008 were based on conversation enablement: Youtube, Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, Skype (see Mary Meeker's chart, below)

Something to be learned here, for 2009!  Source of image: Morgan Stanley Internet Trends 2008

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