Last year social networks went video. This year they go mobile. The power of social media and social networks has created billions of dollars for the people thinking up the ideas, and changed the way us consumers communicate. It's no longer single attention, single direction media, and it hasn't been for a while. What Generation Ms (and Ys) dont have at least IM, SMS, phone, MySpace and YouTube on at the same time?
We're so different to the way we were in the early noughties, what will the next three years of mobile and presence innovation bring? (hmmm, iPhone is a clue). All we've been subconsciously waiting for is for some app to come along that lets you follow all this proliferated media and networks and manage it all from wherever your you take your mobile, and things really start to get interesting.
BL Ochman has reviewed my inital summary of Twitter and its impact on social networks, and its worth a read if you're unsure of how this really is the next big thing.
What do you get when you mix IM, blogging, flash, addictive behavior, RSS and fun? Twitter. Using Twitter is as simple as sending an IM. You can use Twitter from your computer, mobile or IM. Your updates are published online and in an RSS feed too. You can add your Twitter posts to any web page, including My Space, blogs, wikis. And you can build a flash page, like this. You can choose to make your updates part of the public conversation, or only make them available only to your friends.
When I met recently with Sam Sethi at Vecosys he told me he thought that mobile will be the killer platform this year. And true to his word, he's followed through with a post summarising all the Twitter-alikes - those companies using mobile technology to make social networks truly ubiquitous:
Finland’s Jaiku was ramping up and then the US-based Twitter really started taking off in the UK (and now Italy it would seem. (Of course, I’d like to think I helped start the Twitter craze, but I’d rather find the REAL first UK user, so answers via the usual channels). With slightly less industry buzz about them, Hotxt too is attempting to go down the MoSoSo route with a newly free service (down from a pound a week) which uses the data pipe to send text messages between Hotxt members anywhere in the world.
So it seems this year generation M will be given the apps it always wanted. How are we going to use them?
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