The Future of Social Networking - Part 2 of 2

This is the second part in a two part series in which I am exploring the past, present, and future of social networking. The first part is posted here. This post will venture into what I believe to be the future of social networking.

Period Four – Social Networking Goes Mobile

I believe that we have started to transition into this phase but aren’t fully there yet. Early adopters, such as Dodgeball.com, have pioneered the way into the mobile social networking scene. Facebook and Myspace have also recently added mobile features to their sites.

Despite this, I think we will see another level to the mobile scene. The problem today is that mobile aspects of social networking require people to constantly send in text messages. This is not only costly, but requires way too much user participation. Lets face it, we are lazy. Two things need to happen for the mobile scene to explode. One, text messaging needs to become free like in Europe, and two (the most important), GPS enabled cell phones need to reach critical mass.

Imagine the possibility of GPS social networking. You could walk into a bar or restaurant and automatically be notified if anyone of your friends, or friends of friends, are at the same location. GPS enabled phones would drastically reduce the need for text messaging and open up the door for numerous ideas.

Period Five – Bringing Them All Together

I still believe we are a year, possibly even more, away from this. One of the issues that the social networking scene will run into is that as more and more social networks are created, user participation will be diluted on any single network. People will get tired of going through the sign up, profile creation, and friend acquiring process. We are already seeing hints of this as a main reason why people don’t want to sign up for new social networks even though they have better features and design over Myspace and Facebook.

As people have multiple social networking accounts the question will become how to tie all of them together? I’m suggesting a one stop shop where they can easily receive updates from all of their networks. Other features may include automation of profile building and friend acquiring based on information from you other networks. The power of combining only a few of the major players such as Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, and Bebo would be pretty great.

The hurdle? Consent of the various networks. The type of site I described above would certainly decrease traffic, and therefore revenue, for all of the various social networks. With large corporations such as NewsCorp running some of these networks you can fully expect hard resistance. If I had to predict how this stage will evolve, I would place my money on some of the smaller niche social networks being the first to partake in this type of system in order to increase overall exposure. As the number of sites that are included in this system reach a critical amount the big players will have a tough choice to face. Either lose traffic from people migrating to the new system, or lose traffic by participating in the system.

If anyone has an idea on how to approach a site like the one I described above, please email me. I would be more then willing to explore ideas and possibly even fund them.

[tags]Social Networking, Evolution, Mobile Social Networking, Dodgeball, Myspace, Facebook, Brian Balfour[/tags]

Related Posts: The Evolution of Social Networking - Part 1ÂÂ