Social media futures
By Molly FlattEver evolving and ever surprising, social media reliably outstrips future predictions; but trends mecca Wired has just published two pretty convincing visions of where it could be headed next.
In one corner, David Chartier envisions open source thinking expanding as the walls between the different social media platforms dissolve: your content becomes accessible everywhere, and you only need a single login to navigate your whole online social world. He cites the recently announced Google Wave - an open source, social one-stop-shop for content that combines Google’s best online apps such as Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs - as a move in the right direction. Indeed, most commentators have received Wave with serious excitement - although there are some dissenting voices too. Watch the developer’s video below and decide for yourself whether Google have nailed the start of the next great social media phase.
In the other corner Wired puts Julian Dibbell, who declares that, although Twitter itself may soon be superceded (and news that 60% of new Twitter users drop off after the first month has certainly tarnished the tool’s indestructible image), the ‘random, fleeting observation’ that is Twitter’s hallmark has become an entrenched ‘quantum of thought’ from which other cultural forms and institutions will arise.
The two visions actually compliment each other. Add this microblogging mindset that NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has dubbed ‘mindcasting’ - little grains of insight or innovation spreading through social media being repurposed and developed in myriad forms - to the concept of the open, un-siloed and fluid shared web, along with the mobile, realtime and geolocation trends I discussed yesterday, and you get a mindblowing idea of how social media could continue to boost communication, creativity and discovery on a whole new scale.
Gosh. Time for a lie down.
