Over the past few years, social networking has seen a rapid evolution through different stages. From the birth of the technology a few years ago, to today, and now looking into the future, social networking has greatly impacted social interactions, norms, and conventions.
Social networks were first seen as an anti-social technology. In the pre-Facebook days, sites such as Friendster were filled with first-adopters of technology. However, these sites were seen as breeding reclusiveness, simply the next version of the AOL chat room — a place for anonymous people to meet and interact on the internet.
Facebook then changed the game, partially due to the fact of its initial exclusivity. First released only at the Ivy’s, it quickly became a must-have, since the community was limited — you needed an ivy.edu email address to access it. It became, in Facebook’s words “a social utility”, a ‘necessary’ component of one’s social life. Becoming ‘Facebook’ friends legitimized acquaintances, relationships were only official once Facebook said so, and you weren’t at an event unless you were tagged in an album. Even as the platform opened up, beyond the Ivy’s to select top tier schools, then all universities, then high schools, and now anyone, Facebook kept the feeling of a safe, easy to use, social utility. (MySpace, on the other hand, partially due to its design, and perhaps also to its initial open release, does not seem to have the same sort of social utility as Facebook. In the tree of social evolution, it sits somewhere between Friendster and Facebook.)
We are now on the forefront of the next generation in social networking. Social networking technology will be used to actually increase physical social interactions and connect people in the real world.
The new iPhone, with its location enabled technology, will once again fundamentally change the way we interact. Social networks will be mobile, you’ll be able to look at your phone and see exactly where your friends are. Random encounters on the street will be a thing of the past, as you’ll be able to see that a friend is 2 blocks away, heading in your direction, and you’ll even be able to message her to make sure you’re both walking on the same side of the street.
Skeptical? Its already beginning to occur as Sense Networks recently released City Sense, which is billed as
Consumer application for real-time nightlife discovery, social navigation, and answering the question “Where is everybody?”
City Sense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations.
And in the future we’ll see the rise of such location enabled social networks as Loopt, brightkite, and Limbo (which will all be great acquisition targets for the larger social networking sites as they too will be going location enabled in the future).
Some caveats, of course. This change will not be overnight, but gradual over the next few years. Being location enabled is a huge change, and we’ll see a definite backlash as people (rightfully so) are reluctant to release their location publicly. But as any disruptive technology, people will eventually cede privacy for convenience, as the benefits of knowing where your friends are outweigh letting others know where you are. There will have to be extensive privacy settings, letting only certain people know where you are, as well as the ability to turn off your location (which may be like pleading the fifth, you know something us up when someone’s location is off).
