Due to the growth of social media over the past few years, it has been an interesting journey on how social media evolved, tools or how people interact.
Business cards are in my opinion is one of the root of networking. They are cards that show contact information for a person. They normally display a person's name, e-mail address, phone number, website, and company name. What Will the Future of Business Cards Look Like? That is a question that has influenced my work. There is yet to be a replacement platform and business cards is set to be disrupted. They are the reason why I chose to make Social ID a mobile web application as business cards themselves are mobile.
Technological convergence is another key topic which has influenced my work. Convergence is a coming together of two or more different things, Jenkins (2006) states that some people expect that we will eventually access all media content through one device, or "black box".
In my opinion, in the future social media will be everywhere and anywhere, it will be like the internet itself. Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo also states that ‘social media is becoming more like air’. People interact through multiple channels, different types of people and content with different social media. Aggregating various other online media platform into a single stream has started in prominent social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has the feature of showing images and videos from external media to the twitter stream, while Facebook has also integrated other external online media such as Foursquare or Instagram into the wall or newsfeed. Another interesting fact is that people use a certain social media not just because of their feature, it that they want to get updates from multiple social channels. Users want to know what’s going on amongst their friends and family. That is why social networks often attempt to be a personal center for a person’s social life.
The evolution on how people interact is also a trend that is changing. The privacy issue is always a hot topic in social media, but the people’s concept of privacy is also constantly evolving. Try thinking back in time to the state of mind a couple of years ago. In my opinion most of us would be horrified by the privacy terms used by social media. This means that social media users have started to be more cautious and start taking use of the privacy settings and also modulating what they post online. People are learning, adapting and growing more conscious of their surroundings. This creates users evolving to feel somewhat more comfortable and confident about sharing their lives to the internet. Another interesting change is the trend on being less social. Applications such as Path limit their social interactions and features. The application emphases on intensity and familiarity, rather than shallow and wide interactions with your friends and family.
On the other hand most people have a few social media that they consistently use. Study found that females belong to about ten social network sites, while males belong to about half as many. So that means there is a lot of overlap in social media users. People use social aggregation to simplify their social life. There is a need of curation and funnelling as users are struggling to read and update all their various social media. There are also applications which can tweet to all your other social platforms.
In conclusion, the future of social media is a discussion which will affect most if not all of us. Personally I am for the evolution of social media. I believe social media will have a very bright future. Human Relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will befriend and hang out with people from all over the world and Social ID is a social tool which supports the ever growing social media
