http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/theblog/2007/07/13/social-networks-and-traditional-means-of-communication/ For Aspiring New Media Titans Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:28:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/theblog/2007/07/13/social-networks-and-traditional-means-of-communication/#comment-255 Mike K Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:06:43 +0000 http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/theblog/2007/07/13/social-networks-and-traditional-means-of-communication/#comment-255 Personally, I think that this sort of article will go down as a Lord Kelvinesque prediction about technology. Yes, email is not going to disappear tomorrow, but there is definitely some shift from email to social networking sites. Personally, non-work related messaging goes through facebook almost exclusively. I understand that a lot of this is because people in my geographic area uniformly use facebook; it's very difficult to find someone in my age range that doesn't. However, I don't think the variety of different social networking applications that exist will hold back its use for messaging, at least not for long. The trend for emerging technologies as they become better established is towards amalgamation, not further division. I think the number of popular social networking sites will decline, there will be increased interconnectivity between different sites, and the number of users overall will continue to grow. Considering the variety of additional features that these sites offer over email (announcing events, persistent conversations, sharing media, etc), it's difficult to see a reason why these users would continue with email. Additionally, as companies explore intra-office "social networking" systems, the workplace will move in the same direction as the social scene. As email sleeps it is being replaced. Personally, I think that this sort of article will go down as a Lord Kelvinesque prediction about technology. Yes, email is not going to disappear tomorrow, but there is definitely some shift from email to social networking sites. Personally, non-work related messaging goes through facebook almost exclusively. I understand that a lot of this is because people in my geographic area uniformly use facebook; it’s very difficult to find someone in my age range that doesn’t. However, I don’t think the variety of different social networking applications that exist will hold back its use for messaging, at least not for long. The trend for emerging technologies as they become better established is towards amalgamation, not further division. I think the number of popular social networking sites will decline, there will be increased interconnectivity between different sites, and the number of users overall will continue to grow. Considering the variety of additional features that these sites offer over email (announcing events, persistent conversations, sharing media, etc), it’s difficult to see a reason why these users would continue with email. Additionally, as companies explore intra-office “social networking” systems, the workplace will move in the same direction as the social scene. As email sleeps it is being replaced.

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