Is Social Media here for good?
What's on your mind?
Does any one remember e-groups.com or classmates.com which are one of the first social media websites we knew. The trends in the Information Technology world keep changing at a very fast pace in which some of the social media websites have struck gold and some have just been licking dirt.
In the last 15 years of my online presence I had registered to countless such networks and I don't even remember many. In the recent past we have seen Hi5, Orkut and MySpace which appeared to be promising but have become graveyards since Facebook captured the market.
Google and Yahoo did not want to be left out so they tried their luck with Google Buzz and Yahoo 360o which are no longer available. Google just rubbed the losses off its shoulders and continued to copy Facebook and rename it as You+. We have seen a bit of fan following with You+ to which Facebook felt the dire need to give something new to the users so that they come back to Facebook and stay loyal. It was the Facebook Timeline, which allowed users to see their friends' history on Facebook since they joined.
The most happy with the Facebook Timeline were stalkers and peeping toms who felt it is a great tool to look through their ex's mating patterns or allows one to invade someone's privacy with the well notorious Facebook Privacy settings.
But you cannot make users to stick to one thing for long, they keep looking for new ways and tools for their on-line habitat. The internet users are like a grazing herd of African Gnu, if one jumps into the river the rest will follow, not knowing why did the first Gnu jump. All social networks gained popularity when the first few spread the word. What if some different form of internet communication platform is invented by some drop-out from some X university who was successful to get funds from another venture capitalist.
All that we as the users of social media have been putting into the system for free and making business for the likes of Mark Zuck and Larry/Sergey duo will go wasted for which a lot of valuable time and resources from us have been kept with close to zero returns.
The question is do we need to spend our time on useless time wasters like the current social media and make money for others who don't even share a dime out of it, or we work on some resourceful tasks which will help us in our careers and in improving the moral and social standard of our society.
At least by writing these Hubs I feel that i have started doing something useful.
