Social Networking Future

Social networking has come a long way since the days of aol chat. Instead of the one dimensional chats that you had with a few of your friends and a few smiley's to describe your feelings, the interactions are more interactive than ever before.

Today we have Facebook and MySpace where you get customized apps on Facebook to discuss different aspects of your personalities and to share thoughts with friends, and then you can also create personalized pages on sites, such as MySpace and Squidoo.

That begs the question of where social networking is heading in the future. My thought is the following based upon what sites and tools are around right now.

1. Mobile is in and we will see that video and photo sharing are just the beginning as more and more apps that can handle what you do on your computer on your phone. The speed of mobile will continue to increase as mobile computing becomes not only an option, but the main choice for cellphones.

2. A social network for every niche, topic, profession, and hobby. Now that we have major networks, the next step is for smaller networks of like-minded people to join together on smaller networks where you will not need to search for people like you, since they will be the only ones there. That means a 50 year old business executive does not have to search through Facebook looking to network with other executives and only finding people you want to in your network.

3. The future of social networking will be different as our interaction with it will change, so we can in the future not only type our thoughts, but we will see a virtual reality version of social networking that will create a more interactive social networking experience.

The future of social networking will promise new technologies that will enhance our ability to connect with who we want, when we want, and how we want.

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Squidoo

Launched in 2005 by Seth Godin with headquarters situated in New York, Squidoo is a community website which enables its users to create html pages without knowing HTML on their subjects of interest. These pages are called lenses. Success can be contributed to the fact that it is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world and among the top 300 most visited sites in America. Squidoo grew at a phenomenal pace in 2008 by 91% and last year it had around 1 million lenses.

As per Godin's eBook "Everyone's An Expert", he says that by lens he means filtering and showing what we actually want to see. These lenses are much like blog posts.

Squidoo can really provide a platform to market yourself or your business not just because of the reach but for other powerful reasons. Squidoo looks really neat in its appearance. These lenses are placed into niche categories so you could really pinpoint someones area of expertise allowing for easier search and find capabilities. Hence, this works like a lens as whatever you write has to be specifically related to that particular area of expertise.

Suppose a company wants to popularise its campaign about saving paper and is planning to launch a new product, say notebooks, they can create a lens on Squidoo and spread the word about how cutting trees for paper is harmful for our environment. Then when planning to launch a product they can have views from other people as to whether or not they should come up with such a product. Hence in this way companies will be able to test its product before launching it on the market. All these sites provide an elite audience who can really think and can give you critical reviews.

Today more and more companies are going global and using these networking sites to spread their messages and viral marketing campaigns. Squidoo can prove to be a really good marketing research tool as companies through their artfully made lenses can reach a much wider audience. A company can conduct market research through Squidoo where they can ask the questions to the people who follow their lense and create reports based on that feedback. Squidoo like other networking sites exposes you to a large audience at very low cost and in very little time. It helps in building customer relationships while providing your company or project greater flexibility. It provides businesses with easy access to global markets.

As more and more companies are going global and following such marketing tools there is a new scenario which has came into the picture that is called information overload. This refers to the fact that more and more people are having the same sort of information hence with its unique way of making lenses on a particular area Squidoo can really provide breakthrough information to people who want to connect to their audience and have a unique place in their mind and heart. Today more and more companies are using these networking sites to spread their message and easily reach a broader audience than they were ever able to do before.

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