Of Social Networks and Life

I've recently joined Linkedin - a social network of business people.

One of the aspects of the Linkedin site is "Questions" where members get to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics.

The question "What do you envision as the future of social media?" caught my interest as I'm in the midst of helping one of my major customers put up a social site to enhance their huge static-page site.

Read on for my answer.

Tag: linkedin social network orkut technorati

The answer depends on what time frame and what demographic you're looking at.

The 13-25 group has never lived without computers around. My sons are on the 25 end, and they grew up with me sitting in the front room connected to the world via modem.

The low-end of the scale lives in an electronic social world - texting, twittering, oblivious to privacy concerns mostly, and in many ways not caring if they are physically close to their peers. My nephew plays online with a neighbour 2 houses away - they go to the local Macdonalds to get food and return to their own homes to eat and continue to chat via the net rather than sitting together.

My wife is older than me - now on OAP - and can't deal with news via anything but the physical newspapers; completely opposite to the youngsters who hardly pick up physical reading material.

Many of my peers - technology people in mid life - are just getting onto some of the social sites - this one, facebook, myspace, etc. I tried Orkut and Technorati early and found them to be chronivors - time eaters; not enough out of what I needed to put in to make it worth my while. But the tide has changed with the 'texting-byte' 128 character twitter/what-are-you-doing-now world. It has been shaped by the tools we now use that were not prevalent when the social networks first started. We're also past the tipping point of mass such that it is hard to get on the popular sites without running into someone you know in the real world; validating your entry into the virtual one.

Adding video and sound to the social interactions to augment text is just on the cusp of wide-spread use. Most new systems have video/audio built in, and the new generation of all-in-one PDA/phones is pushing this faster. The 3G wireless (and now 4G - faster for more video) is only held back by battery technology at the moment IMHO - and will drive the social networks heavily, replacing twitter-text with twitter-multi-media or some such.

So I'll drive a stake in the sand and say for the younger generation social media will all but replace physical presence for group social interaction including shopping, partying, tourist outings, etc.

For the older generation - we'll just have to drool our way around the edges, participating when we can - and dawdling off to the pub to sit in physical contact with our peers when we find we are so acultured that we simply can't keep up with the youngsters. We know the social media water exists and we have to learn how to swim in it.

The youngsters were born in it and don't know a world without it.

I sit here on dry land, dangling my toes in the water, watching the young fish swim - and you want me to describe how deep they can go and how fast they can swim. You might try asking one of the fish ;)