Social networking has been around since the start of time. The difference today is that thanks to technology and the worldwide growth of the Internet, we can all connect and interact much more quickly. This makes for rapid growth in popular phenomena such as Facebook, which is simply tapping into the way people like to interact.
It's also true of course that the way we interact is shaped by the technology available to us. Consider for example how the telephone first changed the opportunities for instant communication. Only today my daughter came home from school and asked me if she could telephone her best friend - who she had just spent the day with at school.
So is social networking a bubble? No way! But the way we choose to network changes all the time. We always have been - and always will be - influenced by our peers. That's the power of today's online 'social networking' applications, that they tap into our fascination for telling the world what we are up to.
Is social networking bankable? I think yes, more than ever before. For thousands of years, social networking has allowed people to tap into their network of friends and associates (their social network), learn from them, exchange ideas and maybe do business with them.
Today this still happens as we share ideas with a potentially much wider network of people, many of whom we only know online, possibly not by their true identity, and whom we often judge based on others' 'ratings' (as we might do when evaluating a buyer on ebay).
The real potential winners, though, are the brands and organizations who facilitate today's online social networks. They know us better than anybody. Even as I write this comment, Fast Company learns more about me and the things I get excited about. Later today it will serve me targeted advertising based on its growing knowledge of me.
That's surely good for everybody: good for me, because I see less irrelevant advertising; good for Fast Company's advertisers, because they get to target more effectively; and good for Fast Company because it gets to sell a highly targeted media channel to its advertisers.
Media owners and websites will come and go, for sure, but people were created to interact.
Before the first ever human interaction took place, Somebody said:
"It is not good for man to be alone" Genesis 2:18.
June 25, 2008 at 5:29pm by Daniel Ghinn
Social networking has been around since the start of time. The difference today is that thanks to technology and the worldwide growth of the Internet, we can all connect and interact much more quickly. This makes for rapid growth in popular phenomena such as Facebook, which is simply tapping into the way people like to interact.
It's also true of course that the way we interact is shaped by the technology available to us. Consider for example how the telephone first changed the opportunities for instant communication. Only today my daughter came home from school and asked me if she could telephone her best friend - who she had just spent the day with at school.
So is social networking a bubble? No way! But the way we choose to network changes all the time. We always have been - and always will be - influenced by our peers. That's the power of today's online 'social networking' applications, that they tap into our fascination for telling the world what we are up to.
Is social networking bankable? I think yes, more than ever before. For thousands of years, social networking has allowed people to tap into their network of friends and associates (their social network), learn from them, exchange ideas and maybe do business with them.
Today this still happens as we share ideas with a potentially much wider network of people, many of whom we only know online, possibly not by their true identity, and whom we often judge based on others' 'ratings' (as we might do when evaluating a buyer on ebay).
The real potential winners, though, are the brands and organizations who facilitate today's online social networks. They know us better than anybody. Even as I write this comment, Fast Company learns more about me and the things I get excited about. Later today it will serve me targeted advertising based on its growing knowledge of me.
That's surely good for everybody: good for me, because I see less irrelevant advertising; good for Fast Company's advertisers, because they get to target more effectively; and good for Fast Company because it gets to sell a highly targeted media channel to its advertisers.
Media owners and websites will come and go, for sure, but people were created to interact.
Before the first ever human interaction took place, Somebody said:
"It is not good for man to be alone" Genesis 2:18.