Not long time ago, we used to send letters to our friends and look up whatever we didn't know in big books called encyclopedias. Nowadays we use Internet for everything, we look up information in the internet, we watch series on-line, we talk to our friends through live chat... there is no way we could live without the Internet now.
Social networking is the new "Internet", it's everywhere, we use it for almost everything and there's no wonder we are becoming dependent on it. So my question is: will it get standardized?
Think about it, through social media we create our profile, we define ourselves and we connect with each other (just as we would do in real life). My guess is that social networking will eventually end up being standardized in some way, just like HTML is now the standard. This way, the concept of what we know today as "the Internet" could completely change: If our information was standard, the semantic web could take advantage of that, and thus, we could use our profile to handle anything on-line or we could be related in some way to any information on-line.
Probably that approach would lead us to what we all have seen in science-fiction movies. Our id's would be linked to our social identities. In Minority-Report, Tom Cruise can be identified by the iris of the eye; there's a scene where he goes to the mall and because he is identified, he only sees the advertising that could be interesting to him (because his id is related to what he likes and dislikes -information can be inferred from what we all know today as the social network-).
The scene can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBaiKsYUdvg
I think that everything will become standardized in the future. I believe that you will have one standard device that you will use for everything and this will contain your profile to be handled with anything as you say in the post in the form of I.D. After watching the clip from the film, I just read an article that Facebook has just hired Gowalla who are experts in location tracking in order to track user's locations and then offer advertisements to them based on their location, e.g. local restaurants etc. I think that everything you use online will be standardized into one product/feature.
ReplyDeleteCheck out Facebooks hiring of Gowalla! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/8936850/Facebook-hires-Gowalla-staff-to-beef-up-location-based-services.html
Minority report - Great film.
ReplyDeleteI can see social networking becoming a standardized feature of the internet. We depend so much on it, just to educate ourselves through our everyday life. I do see technology slowly revolving around us and our actions, which therefore means our privacy will slowly fade away.
Social networking is already becoming unified on most smart-phones there is an application for every social network,everything you may need on the web such as wikipedia or a dictionary has already been turned into applications and sits there on your phone ready to use. Now also with the creation of utilities such as hootsuite, which is something which links every single one of your social networks together, you can definitely see us moving into minority report mode.
ReplyDelete