Towards a socialised state
The joy of unlimited communication
WHAT will the future of social networking look like? Imagine this: your digital video recorder automatically copies a television show that several of your friends were talking about on a social network before the show went on air. Or this: you get into your car, switch on its navigation system and ask it to guide you to a friend’s house. As you pull out of the driveway, the network to which you both belong automatically alerts her that you are on your way. And this: as you are buying a pair of running shoes that you think one of your friends might be interested in, you can send a picture to their network page with a couple of clicks on a keypad next to the checkout counter.
Networking types like to talk about the idea that there is a pervasive social element in all of the things people interact with. Listen to them long enough and you come away with the impression that your teapot will soon be twittering about what you had for breakfast. Some of the ideas outlined above may sound far-fetched, but a service such as Facebook Connect, which already lets people export their social graph of online relationships to other web-enabled gizmos, suggests they are not completely outlandish. Everything from cars to cookers could ultimately have social connectivity embedded in it.
But when it comes to helping social networks achieve ubiquity, none of these things will be remotely as important as the mobile phone. Using a web-enabled phone to post status updates and send messages is still a niche activity in many countries, but it will rapidly become a mainstream one as mobile-broadband services overtake fixed-line ones in a few years’ time. One estimate by eMarketer suggests that just over 600m people will use their phones to tap into social networks by 2013, a more-than-fourfold increase on last year’s 140m.
Dial-a-pal
This shift has big implications. For a start, mobile phones in emerging markets—or devices such as cheap netbooks linked to the internet via mobile networks—will open up a brand new audience whose use of social sites has so far been hampered by a frustrating lack of fast, PC-based internet connections. Companies such as Sembuse in Kenya, which bills itself as east Africa’s first mobile social network, and South Africa’s Mxit are already gearing up to connect millions more people to one another through their mobile phones, providing a big fillip to the amount of information-sharing going on around the world.
The rise of mobile-phone-based networking will have an impact on rich-world markets too. Thanks to fast and relatively cheap mobile broadband services, phones have already become the device of choice for accessing some sites in Asia. Shigeya Kawagishi, an executive at Mixi, one of Japan’s largest social networks with 18m members, says the vast majority of its traffic now comes from phone-toting customers who check in to get updates four or five times a day (see chart 7). Facebook, which has some 65m mobile users, says they are almost half as active again on the site as other folk.
On location
This trend towards mobile usage is fuelling speculation that the next big thing will be geo-networking apps, which use virtual data to broker real-world encounters. These apps encourage the serendipity that Twitter’s Mr Stone talks about by allowing people to use their mobiles to signal where they are to friends who may be nearby. Several start-ups such as Foursquare and Gowalla are building businesses around this idea and Twitter plans to do so too. Asking people to add their whereabouts to their tweets, the firm hopes, will enable it to use these data to direct advertising and other services at people as they move from place to place.
To some, the idea of a technology that can arrange chance meetings with their friends will seem like a dream come true. To others, the thought of being tracked from place to place is a nightmarish prospect that has a Big Brother feel about it. To people who run social networks, location-based networking is a logical extension of their efforts to humanise technology and harness it to the cause of greater global openness.
The networks’ founders seem to have an almost Utopian belief in the benefits that their creations will deliver. Facebook’s Mr Zuckerberg, for example, describes the greater openness he believes his firm and others like it are bringing to human interactions as “probably the greatest transformative force in our generation, absent a major war.” Mr Stone, for his part, reckons Twitter “is something important that has the potential to change the world, though we have a long way to go.”
Much the same sort of thing was said about the internet when it first emerged. But it was also met with a great deal of scepticism by those who thought the web could never be used to make money, and from bosses who assumed that workers would use it simply to watch pornography and play online poker. The sceptics were astonished when it went on to produce corporate powerhouses such as Amazon and Google, and provided businesses with remarkable new tools for boosting productivity and generating fresh ideas.
The parallels with social networks are striking. That should come as no surprise, because those networks too are creatures of the internet and the ultimate expression of what its founding father, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wanted it to be. In his book “Weaving the Web” Sir Tim explained that the internet was always meant to be more of a social creation than a technical one. The ultimate goal, he wrote, was to come up with something that, first and foremost, would make it easier for people to collaborate with one another.
This special report has argued that social networks have already done much to achieve that goal. They have created trusted online venues where people can meet up using their real identities. They have provided firms with new ways to reach their customers and those who influence them. They have reduced friction in the labour market by allowing employers and prospective employees to connect more easily than ever before. And they have speeded up the flow of information within companies.
All of these are impressive achievements. But arguably the most important contribution that the sites have made is to offer a free and immensely powerful set of communication and collaboration tools to everyone on Earth who has access to a broadband internet connection. This democratisation of technology is driving the socialisation of the web and fundamentally changing the way that people interact with one another, as well as with businesses and governments.
It has also made it easy for anyone to form a globe-spanning discussion group of their own with just a few clicks of a mouse. Not so long ago that would have been the preserve of an elite group of companies and institutions which had the necessary financial and technical clout to perform such feats. Now, thanks to the technology created by Facebook and its peers, millions of these conversations can take place simultaneously with the greatest of ease. The world is better off for it.
Nick Nicholls
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