Social Media and the Gooeyverse

Some "social media" guys have taken to bitching about the term "social media". They feel that it doesn't adequately describe what they do. It doesn't make them feel sufficiently ... special.

Well, there's two ways you can go. Either you replace the term "social media" with something more specific, like "Interactive social network enablement systems", or you go the other way, and invent a brand new buzzword that's shorter, snappier, and more subversive-sounding.

In which case, I vote for "Goo".

Goo is the amorphous, gelatinous set of shifting organic interconnections and linkages that binds and connects us all together. It's not a restrictive "web" or a fixed "net"-work. It's goo.
A locus of goo, like Twitter or Facebook, becomes a gooball. The connections between gooballs, the part of the internet that deals with crosslinks between social media hubs, becomes the intergoo. The global user environment for goo becomes the Gooeysphere, the view from within is the Gooeyverse. "Intelligent" software support for goo ("web 2.0"-based automatic book recommendations, and so on) becomes smart goo. Goo generators like Blogger or Wikipedia, that let users spawn new collections of goo connections are hypergoo.

Corporate blogging and twitterring becomes Blue Goo.

It also ties in well with the idea of links between software and wetware ... and the fact that a Graphical User Interface – the thing that you look at when you use a piece of software – is referred to as a GUI (pronounced "gooey") doesn't hurt, either.

All good clean fun.

Trouble is, how are you going to explain to your mother that you have a career in goo?

"Social media" doesn't sound so bad now, does it?