Death increasingly has a new face. One that endures. One that
has a life of its own.
George Carlin died
Sunday. He was an innovator and a provocateur and at his best,
pretty damn funny. He’s also illustrative of a developing trend –
the public, multimedia epitaph. In fact, he recorded the way he
would like his obituary to be, how he would like to be remembered,
in this Associated Press interview 10 years ago.
This is a trend that really began with videotape, often used to
read wills and say goodbye to loved ones. Now there are sites like
Respectance
that memorialize people in perpetuity, that people can add to in
terms of memories, stories, pictures, video, etc. Where people who
were brought together through that person can still connect. Social
media sites. We also see this on facebook and myspace. (cont.)
Email was introduced to the public in the mid 90’s, marking a
big shift in communication efficiency and relegating snail mail to
the handling of American Express ads, magazine subscriptions, and
utility bills. Since then the corporate world has since embraced
it, just as Hallmark cards have been replaced by e-birthday cards.
But with times and the web changing so rapidly in the last decade
email is now increasingly considered an ‘internet app classic’.
A recent article by Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb
looks to challengers like Twitter and Facebook to dethrone email sooner
than later. Iskold points out that over the last five years the
shift away from email appears to have be in favor of simplicity.
People who once used emails to keep up with family and friends now
have moved on to IM. Similarly, bloggers use bridge apps like
Twitter that combines the shortness of an IM, with the
get-to-know-you personality of blogs. Even the face of email has
transformed with gmail taking the lead in a jack-of-all-trades
interface combining chat and a word processor. (I’m typing this
post right into Google Docs.)
Looking at the trends of the past, I don’t think email will go
in the way of the Dodo. I think of email’s relationship to its
‘successors’ as radio to television. TV didn’t kill radio, and the
Internet definitely didn’t kill TV. They just did all of their
respective jobs the best. Email is still the perferred way for
corporate communication, and a good number of us still tune into
our favorite radio stations on the freeway. Is email in danger
then? Will savvy web users and bloggers one day ditch email in
favor of Twitter and Gchat?
Only two things are certain. Apps will become more modular and
specialized and there will be cross-platform competition.
(cont.)
Not content to be outdone by the pesky likes of Google, Yahoo and Facebook, Microsoft finally walked the plank last night, cannon-balling into the tumultuous social media sea with the conversion of its live.com property.
In a single brazen move that augmented my long defunct Hotmail account with a smart new MySpace-ish application, Live, the 4th most trafficked website on the planet (trailing Yahoo, Google, and YouTube – just ahead of Facebook, MSN, MySpace and Wikipedia), upgraded itself to a full-fledged social network chock full of the usual friending, photo sharing, blogging and events coordination features, as well as a very interesting Cloud storage play called Sky Drive.
It’s a necessary and nearly inevitable reaction as the major players jockey for web users that can fuel advertising revenue and, more importantly, core application usage.
Most significantly it reinforces the trend of web companies providing ever more user value through applications that help them manage their online world. Even the Big Bad Wolf has now succumbed to the new market reality by launching a cuddly (sky blue theme) social network that cleverly integrates email-to-blog publishing, RSS import from all of the biggest platforms, 5 GBs of free file storage and super-easy sharing of photos and other data.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today announced that "150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day."
This brings Facebook to just over 2% total global penetration in just under 5 years time (the company was founded in February 4, 2004) and, based on the shape of this diffusion curve, confirms its status as a major Interactive Communication Technology, as defined by communication scholar Everett Rogers.
Furthermore, it lines up nicely with the history of ICTs, as demonstrated by business and comm professor Vijay Gurbaxani, in which the diffusion of subsequent ICTs gets steadily sharper (telegraph, telephone, web connections), which supports the conjecture that either Facebook, a mirror technology (MySpace, Linked In, Microsoft Live, Orkut, iGoogle), or a combination thereof (most likely) will quickly attain much greater adoption. Obviously this ongoing trend has some serious deep-rooted consequences for the near-term accelerating future.
Equally as interesting is Zuckerberg's observation that, "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria."
While I'm sure the statement was carefully considered and is meant to innocuously communicate the significance of the milestone, it also reveals the immense power inherent in social networks. These structures are among the primary drivers of a flattening world, exerting change on existing culture as they permit a new form bonding across distances, generations and (in just a few years) across language barriers. As such, they are in fact a new type of Massive Meta-Nation that transcends borders and increasingly affects law-making, behavioral norms and personal identity (just as international companies have done for many decades).
Enter Serious Value Creation/Facilitation: If you think the Facebook and social networking phenomenon is just peripheral to real culture and business, you are dead wrong.
Communication Technology, as defined by communication scholar