The landscape of social media is changing rapidly. I can't keep up with which social networks are 'dead' and which are popular—it seems like just a few months that everyone was using MySpace. New social networks are popping up like mushrooms on a wet fall day. Maybe I'm just slow, but it seems like everyone is constantly adding another social network to their already bloated bookmarks list. John Smith invited you to join Facebook. Jane Doe shared a photo on Flickr. Joe Public sent you a friend request on Hamsterster.
Major websites are expanding. Google made an addition to its social networking repertoire with Google Plus, and Facebook recently bought Instagram, a photography sharing site, for 1 billion dollars. This isn't the first website or company that Facebook has purchased: in 2011 it bought Beluga, an IM software company, as well as several others. Facebook just keeps on getting bigger, which leads me to suspect that it's here to stay for quite a while. Although its users often get fed up with Facebook's frequent layout changes and confusing privacy settings, they stick with the website anyways, because everyone else is using it. Facebook is a good site for keeping up with and contacting friends. It has 845 million users as of 2011, and that number just keeps going up. If Facebook continues to annex other social networking companies the way it has been, its shadow will further eclipse smaller, similarly purposed social networks. It could even buy out Twitter some day.
The way people interact with their social networks has changed as well. Internet access used to be limited to clunky desktop computers, but these days you can do everything from check the weather to checking in with friends from a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet.
With the advancement of technology, new products and services emerge. Things like Foursquare, a website that lets users say where they are at any given moment, couldn't exist without smart phones. There are numerous applications, or 'apps' for smart phones, and a great deal of them are social in nature. People can play games with each other using an app like Words With Friends, or use the mobile application for the websites that they can otherwise access on a normal computer.
Smart phones and similar devices are beginning to replace other things in people's lives. You can read the news on your phone. You can read books on an e-reader. Paper is slowly becoming outdated.
As well as replacing previously established activities, smart phones have brought forth something that was previously only found in science fiction: augmented reality. Google has come out with a phone application called Google goggles, which allows users to take pictures of the things around them and find out more information about them. Augmented reality is still in its early stages, but as technology improves it could easily catch on and become widespread.
No trend lasts forever, but there are some facets of human nature that remain constant no matter what. People will always want to connect with each other. And as long as people want to connect with each other and there's sufficient technology for it, there will be social networking. I can't say if Google or Facebook or some yet-undiscovered startup seeding in a forgotten corner of Silicon Valley will be the primary social network ten or fifteen years from now, and I can't say what magical technology will have sprouted up, but I feel confident saying that, bar apocalypse or nuclear war, people will still be using social networks.
This could use a bit more point of view, a bit more evidence, and a bit more edge. For example, about Facebook, you say "leads me to suspect that it's here to stay for quite a while." As a blogger, you need to take a stand!
ReplyDeleteWhile this a well-constructed set of ramblings, part of the job was to impress me, Mr. Social Media Expert (that is, the teacher) with some analysis, whether I would agree with it or not. I didn't get that here.