Social Networks Poised to Shape Net's Future

"Social networks, mobile video and 'Googlism' will continue to transform the Net in years ahead." This news article shares predictions like these from the perspective of Piper Jaffray analysts, who met in June 2006 for the annual Global Internet Summit. The conference highlighted current internet trends worldwide, with a focus on entertainment, advertising, international markets, and social networks. Among the observations and insights featured in this article:

• "The Google revolution is not over yet." The search giant "has been inspiration for many new companies," as well as changing how many companies are formed today.
• Social networks are poised to shape the internet's future, despite some skepticism about how they will make money (advertising dollars continue to lag behind internet usage, and this gap will not likely be closed by blogs or social networks, according to panelists). For example, MySpace.com has surpassed MSN and AOL by measure of monthly page views, and its traffic equals roughly 75% of Yahoo's. MySpace attracted 50 million visitors in March 2006; "Google did not grow this way - it was much slower over time." One panelist suggested that portals like Yahoo may have to team with MySpace and others to attempt to direct their mounting influence.
• Growth opportunities within the market will be for niche communities designed for middle-age or young website surfers. For example, a host of family social-networking sites have cropped up already (Editor's note: A related CNET article entitled Here Come the 'Family 2.0' Sites describes a new generation of websites that borrow many of the social networking concepts, such as photo-sharing and the wiki, to share content which is user-generated from a community of parents offering tips on topics such as immunisation.)
• Mobile devices are another growth opportunity, and video will be a particular complement.

In short, as one panelist put it, "This is going to get big, folks."

Editor's note: On June 16 2006, Sanjana Hattotuwa posted a reflection on the above article on his blog ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace); click here to view "Social Networks Poised to Shape Net's Future & Information Visualisation". He invites dialogue on this piece, particularly on the topic of the visualisation of information - "ways to represent complexity so as to make very large datasets more easier to navigate and comprehend". He is also interested in reflections on the issues that Stefanie Olsen discusses in her news article, but as framed within the Sri Lanka context.