2010: The Bubble Bursts
Posted by Jessica Cox
Filed under: Business | Tags: 2010, Bubble, Social media
Bookmark this on DeliciousThe contents of this post are purely opinion. If you don’t agree, please express your views in a calm manner – aggressiveness gets you nowhere. Thanks.
It’s something that people can argue relentlessly in frequent and repetitive tirades and pointless banter – what’s the future of technology going to be like? Unless you’ve got some good idea behind it, claims that are farfetched (i.e. “tablet computing will replace laptop use”, “standard search is not necessary anymore”) are nowhere to begin. (If I’d like to add, the very possibility of standard search becoming useless is a silly thing to suggest – I search for everything, I almost never use ’social search’, which will apparently replace Google in the next 2 years.)
But hell, maybe it’s necessary for my own little selection of view for 2010. And I’m not talking anything fantastical, but perhaps something glaringly obvious.
‘Social Media’ Boom Won’t Last Forever
I’m not saying that Facebook will lose members, nor Twitter, but it seems to the way that these massive social networking sites will stop growing so exponentially soon – there’s a limit to how many people own a computer and how many people there are on the Earth – and surely Facebook can’t keep growing so fast – else it’d 6 billion people using it ‘weekly’ soon – and yeah, that’s completely impossible (unless we’re in some kind of utopia). But there’s a trend zipping about and it’s that of the social media bubble declining. We have Facebook, for connecting with friends, requiring very little to set up a page (unfortunately leading to a ton of little kids running around on the site). MySpace served that purpose for a while, but a clumsy interface and difficult-to-use system makes it less popular for younger and older audiences. Bebo, too, before that, yet a strange decline for little explicable reason. We have Twitter, for sharing short little quips to audiences that are beyond our friends, beyond people we even know – sharing everything with the public domain, making news heard (or retweeting useless crap from celebrities).
The thing is, I doubt that the Social media bubble will grow any further than the build-your-own website trend (Freewebs, Geocities, Google Sites, etc.) or even the vast expanse of rip-off search engines (mostly using Google tech). Or even the .com bubble, and remember the crash that caused when it burst. Doing business in social media, unless for the giants Twitter, Digg, Facebook and MySpace, is pretty silly. But remember – innovation is key. An innovative product causes a huge audience – Twitter was remarkable in the sense of its simplicity, an idea that’d actually never been done before.
