What’s Next for Social Media?

One thing is for sure: social media is here to stay.  We’ve become so engrossed in what’s happening in the lives of people that we kind of know – as well as that one friend from high school that you still talk to, and your family that now stalks your profile tirelessly – that if all social media shut down tomorrow, people would riot.  Mark Zuckerburg’s house would be in flames and that dude that you automatically follow when you create a twitter account would mysteriously disappear.  The first social media site that I interacted with on a regular basis was MySpace.  For some of you reading this, my opinion is already invalid.  Newsflash: just because you used Friendster doesn’t make you a wiser person when it comes to posting things on the Interwebs for every human being to see.  You still don’t get that potential employers have figured out that they can get a hold of those pictures of you at that New Year’s Eve party with your top off and decide not to hire you.  Why?  Because you’re insane, that’s why.

But I digress.  The question of this article is “what’s next” for this crazy contraption called social media that seems to have captivated the attention of almost anyone with a smartphone.

We have a social media outlet for everything.  The point, it seems, over the past couple years has been for social media to specialize and different sites and apps are being forced to try and find some new idea in order to get any sort of successful.  MySpace is still alive and pretending to be well, regardless of the fact that most people – I hope – haven’t logged onto their account in the last 2 years, besides that one time that they were bored out of their mind with their friends and wanted to take a look back at their “top 8” for a good laugh.  MySpace has come and (almost) gone.  Facebook seems to be dying slowly but surely.  Friendster, before MySpace, had it’s own boom and bust cycle.  Twitter and Instagram seem to be unstoppable, but they definitely have the potential to experience the same life cycle of the sites that have come before them.  What is going to come next?  Will it be a site that relies solely on face-to-face interaction over the internet?  Will tumblr become more mainstream, forcing hipsters to find some other random blog site to populate, leaving the sloppy seconds to the rest of the world?  Will Vine become less annoying and non-inventive?  Who knows.  All we can tell from history is that the sites and apps that we use today will eventually die out and membership will dwindle.  Those who started the companies in the first place will start other companies, and the social media world will reset itself again.

I’m just interested to see what the world comes up with next.

Tags : Facebook, Internet, Internet Matters, Myspace, social media, technology, The Scene, twitter