What’s the Future of Social Networking?

It’s easy to get carried away….

Perhaps, in the future, we will all wear cameras on our heads, emblazoned with our social network of choice. We will be like clans, and people will be able to watch us walk about on their computers, and the cameras will have built-in speakers which anyone can access from their laptops. Obscenities will be shouted from your head without you opening your mouth, most likely at your mother, at which point an Australian will respond through your mother’s speaker with a torrent of antipodean abuse. Your Vietnamese head-friend will reply with some diplomatically dubious language, triggering yet another inter-clan remote-diss deathmatch.

Social networks are only just getting started. At the moment they are a luxury addition to our lives. We can all dabble in Facebook, Twitter and/or any other myriad free sites, exchanging pointless notes and anecdotes. They are the ultimate procrastination aids. Hours can be whiled away staring at the profile of that bloke you met down the pub only once but who somehow managed to track you down (hint: you said ‘or my name’s not ___ ___’ during a drunken argument). The novelty of statuses and tweets is at its apogee - we can all tell everyone else what we’re doing while we’re doing it, and they can tell us what they think about it. It’s communication on an unprecendented level of immediacy. For those who thought the mobile phone was an annoyance, Twitter would probably trigger a mild stroke. Worse still for these folks, this trend shows no sign of abating. But where next?

Web 2.0 recently became the 1,000,000th word in the English language. The 1,000,001th word was a portmanteau variation on ‘bollock-face’, used to describe the person who decided Web 2.0 was a word. Most of us living outside silicon valley take these terms to mean new computer stuff that we’ll most likely have to deal with at some point but only once they’ve been renamed as something more friendly, like a bird, like a little birdie, like Twitter. The initiated understand Web 2.0 to be the second generation of internet usage, where user-generated content (blogging, YouTube) is facilitated by user-led communication (Facebook, Twitter) as opposed to Web 1.0, which can be understood as the standard publish/read interaction of the proverbial web page.

The Web 2.0 idea is immensely powerful. It originally allowed us to exercise our egos in a communal setting. One of the main criticisms levelled at social networks was their function as highly visible popularity contests. While this may have been the case to begin with, the only people who had a problem with this aspect of Web 2.0 were those who cared about those things already. Now, with my mum and dad firmly entrenched in Facebook, the fact that they choose to talk only to people they already talk to illustrates the ability of social networks to reinforce existing corporeal relationships as well as providing a comprehensive portal on which to build new connections. This movement from ego-based networking to genuine relationship reinforcement is a fundamental shift. A Facebook update or a Tweet can now take the place of a text message or a quick phone call. People who you may have had few opportunities to meet due to geographical proximity can now become close friends, just by checking your news feed. The key to the development of this burgeoning facet of social networking will be the mobile phone.

At the moment only Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS provide truly compelling social networking on mobile handsets, yet this is already triggering a massive upsurge and reification of Web 2.0 into our daily lives. Since the introduction of YouTube video sharing on the iPhone 3GS, mobile video uploading has increased by 400% in six days. A decade ago, the dream was for the mobile phone to become a viable Web 1.0 publishing platform. Now, already, the mobile has moved into Web 2.0 territory, where you can publish your YouTube video literally seconds after having filmed it and then, seconds later, receive a comment about the video from a friend or stranger.

This is not simply an ephemeral development either. President Obama has recognised the development of these technologies by accepting a question from a blogger during a press conference. The recent riots in Iran have been shared with the world via Twitter when traditional methods of reporting had been shut down by the government. Democratisation of the distribution of content, and subsequent response and interaction with that content, is the ultimate achievement of social networking thus far.

So where next? Before social networking can develop further, the question of monetisation rears its ugly head. The demand for the services social networking provides is beyond question, and it could well become the foundation for much of web development in the future if - and it’s a big if - the companies that run and maintain these networks can turn a profit. Facebook continues to run on fumes, with its actual valuation unknown and its attempt to accumulate consistent revenues from Google’s famed ad-click model not working out. Twitter faces much the same battle. At the moment, despite some novel efforts, everyone knows that everyone wants social networking without knowing quite how to make a mint out of it. It’s a business model that many will be uncomfortable with.

It is also important to remember that these businesses are start-ups developed by upstarts, success stories that have come about through equal parts effort and luck. Until the monetary value of these networks can be measured (people are investing through speculation-heavy optimism) then their ability to reinvigorate themselves will be hindered.

Assuming that these obstacles can be overcome, and allowing the head cameras to creep back in, social networks could become an integral part of our lives in the same way mobile phones have. Through the improvement of the mobile networking experience, having constant connections to our friends, our family and even to strangers will change how we perceive the exchange of information. Waiting five minutes for a response to a Tweet will seem like forever, just as waiting an hour for an e-mail does now, just like waiting two days for a letter must have seemed a couple of generations ago. The pace will pick up, and the 1990s idea of us having a ‘virtual self’ and a ‘real self’ will be usurped by a fully integrated real and online existence. We will Tweet to our group of friends on the way to the pub, and we’ll keep doing it until we get off the bus and outside the pub, because waiting five seconds to tell your mate what you thought about the latest summer blockbuster will seem like too long. Failing that, I vote for the head cameras.