Charlene Li just posted a "tweet" pointing those who follow her "tweeting" to a new post about "The Future of Social Networks" she just posted in the wake of her keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns West conference.
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The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air
Charlene Li
On Monday, I gave the kick off speech for the Graphing Social Patterns West conference on the topic, “The Future Of Social Networks” (slides are available on SlideShare, summaries available on News.com, ReadWriteWeb, and allfacebook.) Note that this is still ongoing research, so I welcome your comments.
I set my time frame for the long term – five, even ten years out. That’s because unless we know where we want to end up, how could we ever craft a strategy to get there? For inspiration, I thought about my grade-school kids, who in ten years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to “be social”.
Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.
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I have a lot of respect for Charlene Li … she was early as a mainstream IT analyst to get into the issues of blogs, wikis, Enterprise 2.0, social networking and such … but really, isn’t what she’s just written above more than obvious ?
And yes, I do understand that for many people the Internetz is still browsing a few news sites and using email, but it’s also clear that "they" aren’t sending out construction crews to dismantle the Internet any time soon. It’s way past time to acknowledge that there are vibrant and increasingly robust social ecosystems using the Web for virtually any area of human activity.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I ? I believe that we will be living and working in "wirearchies", after all.
Come on, Charlene .. go deeper … you know you can.
Actually, to be fair, she does in the rest of the post, and I would push back on the first commenter who takes exception to Charlene’s Point #4:
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Charlene:
4) A business model where social influence defines marketing value. Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence.
Commenter:
Everything you said seems more than reasonable, up until point 4.
I grant that i’m an outsider to marketing, but all this "influencer" talk (in every single blog talking about "social network/media") seems to me more related with some form of self-celebrity that is present in the blog-sphere. This everyday reality for bloggers is so absorbing that resembles hollywood stars and their self-centered lifes (absurd at times).
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The commenter makes a good point, a point which underscores how much drooling and slavering there is over how this medium is to be used all the time to manipulate, influence, make money, and so on .. but it is also the case that most of human communications(9at least in many parts of North America) is about influencing, manipulating, gaining advantage, making a point, selling something.
This is the culture we live in today (I did not say I like it) and Charlene’s point #4 stands on its own, I think, with regards to social networking platforms and social networks being in daily use for a wide range of human purposeful activity known as business.
In case I might be accused of being snarky or arrogant, it’s a challenge (going deeper) I would issue to myself as often as not as well. Yes, I have been known to be trite.
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