Get Shouty

I’ve recently come into a great new term: ‘the present future’. What I think it means is that our world is changing so rapidly that you really can only plan for the next 10 minutes. What you can conjure up is only informed by what you can see right now and that it’s very likely subject to change, possibly next week. But hey- it’s traditional at this time of year to look forward. 

Social Networking was certainly the J curve to beat in Australia for digital uptake. I really don’t think that the behaviour going to change, though I believe that participants will have growing needs as the ecosystem expands. I’m feeling alliterative as I look into my crystal ball for 2008, so this is the future for it that I’m seeing right now:

• Filtering
  • We’re all suffering from information overload, even in our personal digital spaces. Too many Facebook friends. Too many emails in too many accounts. Too much content from people that we never wanted to know quite that well preventing us from getting updates from the people that we started social networking to keep in contact with.
  •  2008 will be the year the we set up filters so that not every one can see after-hours photos or information about career successes. We will choose who can see what aspects of our lives. We will value  our own individual micro-networks  over the exposure of a totally open platform.
• Fetching and Feeding
  • Remember when you couldn’t send an SMS between carriers- that you had to be on the same network? Seems mad now, eh?
  • Isn’t it amazing how quiet the whole Open Social thing has become? One of it’s greatest promises was for you to be able to be social networking platform agnostic…..unless you were on Facebook of course…
  • 2008 will be the year when you’ll be able to fetch and feed any information about your mates from anywhere, and to any device.
• Facilitation
  • No I really don’t want to be bitten, I don’t want to bid for you in an auction and I can’t be arsed finding out my “whatever” name.
  • 2008 will find applications that provide a whole lot more utility than merely prompting interaction, particularly as brand find out that they can provide real value in facilitating great experiences for people who use social networking.
  • Facilitation could mean providing real world events and opportunities for people to meet like minds, or fetching me content that it is known that I like (provided by my filter), or group feeding me and my friends information on a subject that we want to grow our knowledge about….

 However you look at it, for Social Networks it will be two thousand and great.
(I promise I won’t do that again!)