The Next Evolution of Social Media…
Next step of social media will include real time video conferencing! That is a reasonable assumption, but it is not really the reason why I am writing this.
I read an interesting post today, with the same title.
Author of the article argues that the very design model of social media is responsible for a bad content sometimes being rated highly. This happens because people like to be friendly and to vote for their friends, which is all nice, but if you don’t really like that much your friend’s bookmark selection, then effectively, infinitesimally but accumulatively, you are contributing to the lowering of the quality of the voted content. Since social media exists thanks to users submitting the content, you do need to keep users happy, and allow them to rate each other in some way. So how do we find a solution to above problem?
Lets go back to the title: the next evolution of social media. It is always a challenge trying to figure out what will happen in the future. One good way to go about it is to figure out what is wrong with the present, as someone will definitely try to correct it. Well, one of the wrong things was mentioned above.
I think that one of the causes for mentioned user behavior is social media segregation. Each website has its user base, its rules, interests, and ratings. Within every social media people are trying to get recognized, as recognition, mantra, mojo, feedback score, etc. yield greater exposure and influence. These things are changing.
Web will soon go Semantic, and there will be a global social graph which will be open to everyone. Unlike today when SU, Delicious, and other social sites keep information closed on their servers, in the near future, information from most sites will be accessible to everyone. Most sites will have Open Id which will make this integration easier. We will be able to combine this global graph and networking information with our personal contacts and preferences, and have personalized social applications, rating, ranking and sorting algorithms. There will be much less ‘pressure’ to vote for hundreds of friends we never meet, nor have exchanged few sentences with. We will have our real life friends as part of this Global Social Graph, and semantic data will allow that our similarities and differences be found, even if we use different sites.
For a more technical read visit this site.
If you liked this post, please share your thoughts on the topic, and use your social media (stumble, digg…).
Also, on unrelated issue, there are guys trying to patent a ‘technology’ that is so simple and that would prevent all other sites from using it (including mine). Please check it out and read on its about page the details.
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Category: social media 5 comments »
March 19th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Well thought of blog post. Thanks! I’ve really enjoyed reading this one over the others and hope you’ll be able to post more often (been over a month!!).
April 10th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
If anything, I predict the reverse- more sites, more user bases, more differentiation. That’s just me though.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:01 am
Thanks for brining that article to my attention. Social media is flawed in design – if you really want to think about it its more of a popularity contest. A submission can be complete crap, but if a certain user has a certain amount of popularity, his/her submission is likely to end up plastered on the front page.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Social Media is gossip with point-scoring. Don’t over think it.
September 11th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I have to agree with Michael. You see it with any medium or technology over time: fragmentation. The transition from mass to segmented communications doesn’t happen over night, but it does inevitably happen. As stated above, this could be seen as some form of “social media segregation,” but it’s actually more of an evolution than anything. It benefits visitors and audiences because as they have more specialized interests and desires, different sites will cater to them with more specialized content. It’s still early in the game for social media (the Gartner Hype Cycle may be a good indication of what the future holds), so let’s see what happens.