But the web was still lonely, because although trustworthy newsanchormen and companies urged you to visit Aych Tee Tee Pee Colon Forward Slash Forward Slash Doubleyou Doubleyou Doubleyou Dot Something Dot Com, you still had to slip on your shoes and leave your house to visit friends and family (although you had a special online connection with Aunt Harriet, who forwarded those joke emails regularly sourced from her bridge club).

And then there was Friendster, where you could collect acquaintances like comic books, and even describe what a unique and beautiful individual each and every one of us really is.  MySpace came along and you didn’t have to travel to India and contract intestinal parasites to see what a shanty town looked like. Also, if you turned up your volume, you could hear loud music!

Time Magazine called it social networking, but it was still mostly about the individual.  Your entry page consisted of a deliberately crafted profile enumerating your interests and your activities. Facebook came along with the newsfeed and morphed into something strangely fascinating because it was less omphaloskepsis and more about your friends. Plus, your tech-neophyte high school posse finally came out of their shells, bought a MacBook, and posted cute pictures of their three (and counting) children.

So the Web of Individuals recently transformed into the Friend Web.  This shift will become more prominent as Facebook’s strategy for world domination lets you log into any partner site using your Facebook credentials. As this service gains popularity (and it will), you’ll wake up to a web where your friends are surfing alongside you. This is in Facebook’s best interest since it desperately needs to monetize the social graph you helped it build with every click. Likely, Facebook hopes to overthrow Google as the company that knows the most about your online identity. By mashing up a website’s subject matter with its database of your friends’ behavior and interests, Facebook has a golden opportunity to display extremely focused and relevant ads.

However, while I don’t doubt that Facebook will generate substantial revenue, go public and turn scores of 20-somethings into post-web 2.0 era millionaires, there’s a limitation in the surf-with-your-friends paradigm, at least from an advertiser’s perspective: One cannot confidently conclude that an ad which I find relevant is of similar relevance to my friend (not to mention my friend’s friends). If I click on a BMW banner ad while surfing an auto website, should my friend be presented with the same car ad? Despite the advancements in German engineering, perhaps he prefers American built cars. And what if he’s befriended Facebook’s leading biker gang members, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a machine boasting more than two wheels and might be offended by a car ad?

I believe group affiliations, rather than friends, serve as the best window into an individual’s psyche and are thus most valuable to an advertiser. On the web today, group affiliations are explicitly defined through services including Yahoo Groups or Ning.com’s microsite social networks.  And less obviously, they’re also implicitly defined through actions taken on any website, whether it be by subscribing to a newsletter on a band’s homepage, editing a Wikipedia article, or watching a YouTube video or movie trailer.

As the web becomes more semantic or self-aware, I expect it will become easier to join a group.  Imagine a browser plugin that suggests affiliations based on our clicks around the web. If I routinely map San Francisco addresses and also visit websites for small bands, maybe I’d be interested in joining the Bay Area Local Bands group which, in addition to local music scene discussion, offers bonus MP3 tracks.  If I purchase an April flight to New York, book a hotel, and visit theater related websites, I’d be delighted to receive a message from my personal browser agent recommending that I join the New York tourist Broadway Show (Spring Edition) group.  I might even consider paying for the privilege if promised access to preferred seats and a pre-show cocktail hour.

Since brands happily pay high CPMs to reach a targeted group, I predict that the web will evolve to cater to these affiliations. We’ll roam the web in packs, discussing issues that matter to us as a group with a common interest and purpose. For example, a controversial article or blog posting might spawn a private side conversation amongst the group.  Perhaps the group will collaboratively craft and post an official response.  In a more commerce oriented example, large groups could leverage their buying power and dynamically negotiate discounts on retail sites like amazon.

With Facebook now enabling us to log into other sites and surf with our Facebook friends, the web is reaching a new maturity – the Social Web or Friend Web.  But as discussed in this post, this will naturally give way to the Group Web, where technology connects us and makes it easy to surf not just with friends, but also alongside likeminded people who share our passions and affiliations.