July 07, 2009
The social crowd is always connected these days, in more ways than one. In a networked world, the need to stay connected is acute even for people we wouldn’t normally consider busy. In recent times, several social networking tools and micro-services connect people digitally in ways we have not experienced before.
While the telephone and email manages to keep us fairly well connected, there seems to be a growing desire for richer, quicker means of staying "in the know" about anyone or anything that interests us. Friends want status updates on that special occasion or experience as it happens, and it's finally possible to let them have it.
Empowering this idea is the new wave of smart phones that can take pictures, record videos and connect to the internet to upload these items; and sending short messages to friends to keep them reliably informed about your activities as they take place.
Among the social networks that allow this level of sharing are twitter, facebook, hi5, myspace, flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. Twitter, for example, lets members "follow" other users and they are also followed. Many celebrities, iconic figures and companies use these services to have a constant flow of information in small conversations called "tweets" that are instantly accessible to their "followers". It’s a neat platform to share briefly what’s happening in your world. It’s also used for linking friends to interesting online content that is great for making conversations.
Facebook, the cool big brother social network recently switched focus to be more of a "what am I up to now" network, in addition to its original goal of keeping and reconnecting people. Facebook has expanded mostly through the applications that can be used on its platform. There’s an app for almost anything, like slide shows, competitions and for using facebook on smart phones like Blackberries making it even easier to be constantly active on social networks.
New generation mobile devices are essential in feeding the need for individuals to broadcast every minute detail of their daily lives and for those who feel the need to follow these updates.
Also critical is how companies are using these networks. They announce competitions, products, events, etc. A note of caution, however: individuals must be careful with the information they put out there because these corporations will have access to every little detail of your life (or what you chose to put out there - so no bad mouthing...)
There are also tools to analyze this "chatter" to get a sense of what people are saying about their products at any moment of the day.