Posts Tagged ‘MySpace’
I hear Facebook will be dead in 5 years
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
I was reading an interesting blog post awhile back that was discussing whether Facebook will even be around in five years. It seems that social networking sites are unable to find a business model that translates into profits. Being that my business revolves around social media, this started to concern me. But then I realized: who cares!
My epiphany came in the realization that social media is not at all a shift in technology; it is a shift in the way we communicate. No longer are we dependent upon a single source to push out a message through a given medium. Although television, radio and magazines will almost certainly continue in some form, their impact has already begun to dwindle. Large conglomerates no longer dictate what information we should know; we have become a water cooler society.
What I mean by water cooler society is that our information is now distributed casually from person to person, just like rumors at the office water cooler. Yes, we can learn about the Iraq war from the massive amount of television coverage or we could read the blog of a soldier fighting on the front lines. Yes, we can get a recap of yesterday’s news from the newspaper or we can hear it from our friends in our news feeds.
Although it may seem like it, this water cooler society did not arrive on our doorsteps overnight. Since the advent of the internet we have been moving in this directions. Forums, chats and groups paved the way for what we now call social media. Forms of blogging have been around since the mid-nineties and modern social networking sites since the early 2000s. Granted, this is a quick timeline in the sense of changing how information is passed from person to person, but is by no means instantaneous. Society has been striving for a new way to communicate for sometime now.
Even if Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn all fall off the face of the earth tomorrow the way we communicate is unlikely to change. In their void will come new technologies that allow us to continue our water cooler society. Gone are the days of one-way communication and here to stay is an era of word of mouth conversation. So, die if you must Facebook, it wont effect my business none.
Tags: communication, Facebook, linkedin, MySpace, social media, social networking, Twitter
Posted in Opinion, social media | No Comments »