by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
Social Media 2009 - time to grow up
The geekier ones amongst you may already have come across this story from the ReadWriteWeb site about 10 Ways that Social Media Will Change in 2009 - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_social_media_will_change_in_2009.php
Couple of quick extracts:
But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.
Meaning and connection -- two key anchors of all things social media -- are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls; and for these reasons, social media as we know it is changing course.
The 10 themes for 2009 include it's all about people, creating meaning and value, enabling convergence, advertising and how social media will make money in new niches.
Useful reminder of the inevitable sifting and sorting that is going on in this field. But some underwhelming insights, it seemed to me, about what makes for good social networking - connecting people into communities that are relevant to their interests, looking for ways to create meaning and connection etc. Ok, not much argument there but not much insight either, I would have thought. People crave meaning and useful connections in their social lives, on or off line. Pretty basic. The interesting part of the story is the hints about new ways applications developers are trying to find better ways to create some easily manageable coherence for social networkers. Sounds like a worthy ambition...
Comments
I think the most interesting development in this area is likely to be platforms that make it easier to pull together all the different networks people get involved in. Potentially this will hollow out a lot of the main existing platforms, e.g. I will stop going to Facebook and just have a place where all of the inputs from my different networks (Facebook, Ning, Linkedin, Twitter, etc) are pulled together. It seems to me that the biggest problem for people today is the fragmentation of places they would like to be.
posted over 3 years ago