John Battelle on The Conversation Economy, Hairy World Issues and High School Musicals Part 1 of 2.

Here’s an excerpt from this week’s DishyMix:

Susan Bratton: Scott McClernon, one of my dear friends, President of Upstream Group Habitat, who has also done a DishyMix episode, wants to know your unique perspective regarding the popularity of the web from ’99 to ’08. He wants to know about so many social networks, so many social media offerings; an example being Fox recently launching a social network for weather. What do you think about this explosion; all the social networking implications? Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, was on DishyMix talking about her 260,000 communities that she’s founded already.

John Battelle: 330,000 now.

Susan Bratton: 330 — there you go. Yeah, it was like a month ago, God. So where’s all this going, John?

John Battelle: I think we’re very, very early in this particular part of it. You know there’s a very robust conversation going on inside, in the equivalent of inside the beltway, right inside the valley. You know around data portability and OpenSocial and a lot of different pieces that are supposedly going to make the social network fatigue syndrome go away.

But we have to remember that there are untold millions of people who have never been in a social network, don’t even know what it is and aren’t sure why they would be. I have a feeling this majority of people who are going to come into social networks are going to do it without realizing that they’re actually doing it. It’s just going to be part of a useful application for them and it might be as simple as “Hey, join my Live Journal or my WordPress group so we can share pictures of the family.” The next time this person who joined that goes to, say Facebook, all of the data they already put in populates because the plumbing works right.

Right now the plumbing does not work right. So we all bitch and moan about how we have to join another social network, but our experiences are not going to be the experiences of the majority of people 5-10 years from now.

Susan Bratton: I like the “social network fatigue.” That’s a good catch phrase. I agree with you. We get bored with things before they even become something.

John Battelle: Right.

Susan Bratton: We’re so jaded.

John Battelle: It’s like “Oh, God. I’ve been blogging for ten years.”

Susan Bratton: Blogs; that’s so old-fashioned.

John Battelle: Well, my wife started a blog about two months ago and I knew that it was here to stay.