Social Networking Technologies
As social networking technologies continue to grow, their influence has spread from what was just used in the bedroom of a teenager trying to procrastinate to the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company. The best example of the widespread growth of a social networking site is Facebook. Originally aimed toward an audience of under and post graduates (18-24 yr. olds), Facebook has expanded its audience to those of all ages and is growing on average at a rate of five million more users a week. Facebook, now estimated to be worth $3.7 billion, continues to grow at an exponential rate with goals to become much more than a website used to connect with friends.
Facebook is designed to emulate everyday scenarios that we have such as bumping into old friends, flipping through photo albums, and joining various clubs. These highly addictive features of the website keep users logged on the website for an average of 169 minutes a month compared to just the 10 minutes people spend on the New York Times website. As social technologies continued to spread, various organizations began to realize the massive influence these sites have. For example, political parties are using Facebook as a way to organize rallies and companies like Dell, are recruiting and screening employees by using Facebook.
Facebook’s ultimate goal is to become a standardized communication and marketing platform. “It becomes the equivalent of the phone itself: It is the main tool people use to communicate for work and pleasure. It also becomes the central place where members organize parties, store pictures, find jobs, watch videos, and play games. Eventually they’ll use their Facebook ID as an online passkey to gain access to websites and online forums that require personal identification. In other words, Facebook will be where people live their digital lives, without the creepy avatars.”
To obtain this ambitious goal, Facebook is relying on the steady stream of advertisements that decorate Facebook. After the failure of the application called Beacon, which allowed users to see visited website and even purchases of other users, Facebook is now implementing a new feature called Facebook Connect. “Facebook Connect lets users log on to company websites using their Facebook logins. “The system, which dovetails with the vision of a Facebook account as a form of personal ID on the web (privacy settings and all), appeals to advertisers for a couple of reasons. When a user logs on to a third-party site using Facebook Connect, that activity may be reported on her friends’ news feeds, which serves as a de facto endorsement.”
Not only will these social networking technologies reinvent the way we talk with friends and family or search for a job, they will reinvent the way we purchase everyday commodities. In the near future we will no longer have to search through a website such as Amazon.com for a product, but rather all we will have to do is look at one of our social networking sites and recommendations for purchases will be displayed. Also in the future it is possible that electronic forms of media such as DVDs and CDs will no longer exist as they will be replaced by digital downloads, possibly from larger social networking sites.
Social networking technologies will not only impact the way we communicate with friends and family, but they will drastically change many of the things in our everyday lives. These technologies will improve the way we shop online, expose us to various forms of media we were not aware of, change the way we are subjected to advertisements, and render many of the technology today obsolete.
How Facebook is taking over our lives.
