Social Media: The Next BIG Thing

During the mid 90s when getting a landline phone and obviously a number for it became easy things started changing. I was a small kid then, so I actually can’t recall the actual change and the impact of it. However, I do remember my Mom saying that we used to write letters to our relatives, friends and the dear ones. With the access to phone we saw the concept of letter writing rubbished to a larger extent. Then arrived the pager from Motorola which was a mini revolution. It created a buzz in the market until the invention of mobile that happens to be one of the biggest revolutionary inventions in the history of communications. Slowly the pager fazed out and made way to its successor. Having said that you all might be surprised to know that pager is still in use. It created revenues of $2.1 Bn in 2008 which compared to $6.2 Bn in 2003 is peanuts. However, point to be emphasized here is that it still exists. During the same period of mid 90s internet took over with a bang and we entered the digital world. Since last 15 odd years we have been seeing, using these applications and devices for commercial, personal, professional use with great ease and with increasing expertise. But am I now seeing these technologies getting obsolete soon? Yeah. I know they are not going to faze out but I think very soon we would at least see a drop in the use of these things. The reason being the surge in the number of SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES (SNSs).

Some info for my readers…. SixDegrees.com was the first recognized SNS which was founded in the year 1997. The craze though caught upon later in the beginning of 21^st century thanks to Mark Zuckerberg with his invention which popularly is known as Facebook. Thanks to the changing demography and psychology showing more affiliation towards digitizing we are seeing yet another revolution. There are more than 400 SNSs today in the world to say the least. Please get it confirmed with the following links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/

There were days when we used to call up our friends to ask the score of cricket match. But these days we have twitter to send instant messages that to free of cost. The call rates once stood tall at Rs15.20/- today are down at a meager 30 paisa. Browsing internet would create a hole in the pocket leaving us at least Rs 50 short of our savings that too for within an hour. A pub was attacked in Mangalore by some Sri Ram Sena activists. Soon, the pink chaddi campaign was in the making and ably supported by these SNSs. Facebook even had “Pink Chaddi Campaign” community which got fan following in thousands. “Michael Jackson RIP” community on Facebook has fan following of 4.5 million people on FB alone. That’s crazy. This tells us how much we are getting into this SNS thing. Blogging has come up big time. Celebrities have started blogging. It has helped people communicate and express their feelings with people they don’t even know. Never in my life have I been to Jammu and Chennai. But today I can say I know at least one person in these places. The list of SNSs is never ending from FB to orkut to tagged to myspace to hi5 to something else to something else and on and on

I think very soon the telecom sector will find this out and they would stop charging for calls and the only charges would be for data i.e internet usage. With all the stuff written above I think I can say “Social Media is the next big thing”.

What say Guys???????