It came from topLingo's blog ...

The blog WebWorkerDaily posed the question, is the word “social” overused in reference to social web sites? That seemed like an interesting question to comment on, and so I did:

I’ve noticed we humans tire of words quickly and to demonstrate, here is the question, “Is Social So Over?”

I think not.

Web evolution is causing us to evolve and invent language – to create shortcuts to describe sometimes nebulous concepts. Nebulous like computing in the “Cloud” one might punningly say.

There’s a reason why Eskimos have over 30 words to describe snow. Snow is more important and ever changing in their world – as the web is in ours. They’re probably not so much tired of the word, but have found it not specific enough for many purposes.

A nice short useful word like “social” will be with us for a very long time, I’m guessing. But like Eskimos, we won’t be satisfied just to know there’s snow outside – we’ll want to know the color, texture, granularity, depth and more - and on the web, that the site is a dating site – or a social cause site – or a targeted community site like “a long haul trucker load board community site”.

Yeah, social’s a bit worn and saggy.

But still as good as snow.

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