At the core of social media today is relatively new consumer behavior in terms of not just a willingness to share content, personal information, and so on- but a downright passion for doing so. The nature of the Web begets sharing, for sure- but the first widespread activity requiring sharing of information not usually publicly exposed may very well have been peer-to-peer music filesharing.

A regret of mine is that we weren’t able to use the information Napster users exposed on their hard drives to create “tribes” or “collectives”, or to connect our users in other ways. Our “Someone Like Me” feature allowed users to search for others with similar music in their collections. This enabled better trading and music discovery, of course, but we always thought it was the beginning of a social network as well. (Not to mention a GREAT dating service….) “Someone Like Me” was disabled through most of Napster’s existence for legal reasons.

We loved the sharing concept and it was at the core of the Napster tagline I created: “Thanks for sharing.”