Matt Bush

CS73N

April 20, 2007

The future of social networking sites will entail four major developments:

• Design focus on customer safety to expand market
• Broadening audience through technological literacy, age, income, nationality barriers
• Universal social networking format to accommodate different networking interests
• Tool for social activism and projects

Social networking websites and interfaces will be much more geared towards customer safety. Today’s biggest sites, while bringing in millions of users, still carry concerns of information privacy, anti-phishing security measures, threats of viruses through any filesharing, and unmoderated content. Myspace.com in particular has a reputation as an oasis for online predators, because the site is built around sharing multimedia content, not around encouraging users to protect their personal information, stigmatizing social networking sites among concerned parents and educational institutions. In order to retain the tech-savvy market of young teenagers, the future’s successful social networking sits will thus be built around alleviating any safety concerns present in the site design. I can imagine we’ll see even more customizable privacy controls and reminders about avoiding phishing and predation than we do today, in order to create a safe virtual social environment. 

Social networking websites of the future will reach to a much broader audience than today’s social networking sites. Today’s biggest social networking sites base themselves on student and young professional populations who network with each other based on their high school, college, and or job. The ZDNet.com blogger Paul Lamb sees this limited audience as a flaw, and envisions future social networking sites as a social service rather than as a consumer product. He believes that social networking sites could branch out across income, age, and nationality barriers.⁽¹⁾ Microsoft recently announced plans to sell a stripped-down but functional version of its Windows operating system to low-income populations and developing countries.⁽²⁾ Both Lamb’s vision and Microsoft’s announcement suggest that the social value of widespread technological literacy and Internet community should be more important than software and Internet site profits. If this becomes a common ideology, then we can expect social networks to be more widespread across the world, and used in new contexts such as neighborhood networks, family networks, and foreign exchange networks.

In a post on the blog engtech, the blog’s anonymous author related his experience of creating a Facebook profile as a man wanting to express both his professional image and his personal image. He explained that the site’s design creates conflict between the two main purposes for which it is used, professional networking and purely social networking.⁽³⁾ Most websites don’t allow a user to have two fully-functional profiles under a single account, an inconvenience for people who wish to have separate profiles for separate networking interests. Additionally, today’s social network users are also ultimately separated by the networking site itself: if a person has some friends on Facebook.com and some on Myspace.com, then they need a profile on both websites. In the future, social networking could be an Internet data format such as email that is compatible between different servers, rather than data restricted to a network within a commercial website, and a person could customize different profiles for professional and personal use just as easily as how they include different signatures in professional and personal email messages.

Today’s most popular websites have already turned into a powerful tool for social activism and projects. Most events and parties taking place at Stanford are listed as events on Facebook.com, which allows students with profiles on Facebook to view information, pictures, and even RSVP to these events, lessening the need to advertise events through more laborious means like flyers. The social networking sites of the future could act as a convenient interface for every step of project and event planning, if they weave together social networks’ ability to connect people of common interests with online collaboration software such as Google Documents. Social networking sites recently have fostered social activism; mere hours after the shooting at Virginia Tech on April 16, thousands of Facebook users changed their profile pictures to a black ribbon and expressed their shock and compassion in their profile’s status.⁽⁴⁾ Another group of concerned students created a Facebook group called “I’m OK at Virginia Tech” to let their contacts on Facebook easily find out that they were unharmed. Social networking sites allow their users to unite under common goals and can quickly spread news of an emergency or an important message; Internet analysts often refer to this spread as “viral”. This particular power of social networking sites shows how sites’ customers essentially treat the site as a social service, not as a consumer product.