Hello Facebook, Hello Twitter! You are so 2010!
That’s right, you know i’ve talked about the fact that the half life of social networks tend to be about 5 years. So what is the future of Internet based social networking? Well let’s review technologies that no one ever thought would disappear.
AOL as your one stop Internet provider/launch pad.
Yahoo, one time the only search engine you ever used.
Netscape, the best Internet Browser E-VAH!
MySpace, What is that website all about?
That’s really just a top list of things that you have to be familiar with to understand that even though something looks like it has staying power, the reality is that it only does until the next best thing comes to town. The the next best thing has to do something that is different and unique while at the same time is making your life better.
FACT: An enormous amount of web content is being consumed and added via mobile devices.
FACT: In the next 3 years LTE and other “4G” type technologies will allow for reasonable access to the Internet for mobile devices regarding Multi-Media.
So what will be the next big thing for social networks? A site will emerge that will combine a number of technologies and do it better than FB or Twitter, the features will include this:
Privacy controls that allow you to have both Trusted Friends and unknown friends. This will allow you to share data in different ways to different people.
Better integration of your data. It’s your data, you own it, you have a right to either host it on your own systems, or within its system. You won’t be stuck in a stove pipe for your content.
Location Awareness to help you discover more things in the world around you. Not just a check in, but when you do, you get instant discounts and can rate the place and the service, post photos and everything to share (with privacy controls).
Voice to text integration for updates to your feed. But more than that, if you say, activity, it will link you with the activity or event that you’re associated with.
Video Tagging of people when you upload your videos.
OK you say, there are websites that are kind of doing this and you can kluge them all together to sort of do that, but what will be revolutionary, not just evolutionary??
The revolutionary thing will be that you will have integrated FREE phone service as part of your social networking. While that may not sound like a big deal, what it means is that the next best thing will eliminate your need for a telephone number all together. Soon you will have digital communications account, portable and integrated with any system. This will work for voice and video.
What it means is that mobile users eventually will only pay for data plans and eventually landline phones will not be able to “Dial” direct to those phones unless those data users have an intermediate phone number that forwards to their mobile device.
Phone numbers will be dead in 20 years!
Data only phones will be available in 3 years!
Your voice will be your link to the next revolution of the Social Networking experience, integrated in ways that you can’t yet even imagine.