Will the social networking juggernaut transform human communication?
By Ross O. Storey
24 Nov 2009
The burgeoning social networking systems that are on a huge growth trajectory in Asia and across the world might kill e-mail as we now know it.
In July last year, research house IDC did a survey and predicted that by the second half of 2010, instant messaging will overtake e-mail as the world’s preferred form of business communication.
According to IDC back in July 2008, young people are becoming increasingly plugged in and hyper-connected :"the migration to hyper-connectivity will create a profusion of devices, applications, and new business processes" and, already, "the average hyper-connected individual uses at least seven devices to access the network and nine connectivity applications".
E-mail is passé
Discussion at a Singapore roundtable I moderated last week reinforced this view, but from the consumer end. One of the delegates told our group that young people he knew already regarded e-mail as passé. They are fed up with spam, viruses and everything else that comes with e-mail and now do most of their communication in real time, via instant messaging, or through social networking systems. Youngsters just love SMS and instant messaging but apparently feel that e-mail has had its day. And business does not seem to be far behind.
By the way, even SMS appears to be a fading technology. According to an announcement today from IDC, mobile multimedia services – where people send pictures, videos and music – is, by the end of this year (just five weeks away) set to become ‘the new King of non-voice service’.
Source: IDC’s Asia/Pacific Semiannual Mobile Voice, Data and Multimedia Services Tracker, 1H 2009
Ringtones and wallpaper
Would you believe that ‘Early drivers of growth in mobile multimedia content have been ringtones and wallpaper downloads, particular with the younger demographics’ (IDC)?
Our roundtable discussion revealed that many of the major enterprises represented already regard instant messaging as a major business tool, despite the potential digital security problems.
So have the hackers, black hats, cyber criminals and phishers of the world nearly killed the e-mail goose that laid the golden egg? Will they soon turn their greedy attention to instant messaging? Very likely. If the digital security vendors of the planet are not yet focusing on protecting instant messaging, perhaps they should be.
Already, new research indicates that the growth in volume of instant messaging through the various channels (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) is much greater than the growth in the use of e-mail.
A surging Google Wave?
And then there’s Google wave which was announced in May this year and released to more than one million invited users for select trialing. Uncle Google tells us that: “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more”.
According to Wikipedia: “Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform written in Java using OpenJDK. Its Web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. “Google Wave,” says the online user-created encyclopedia, “works like previous messaging systems like e-mail and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.”
Change with a capital ‘C’
What a swirling, churning and seething communications environment we now live in. The very busy folks at IDC have released yet more research this week that claims “mobile devices are the preferred tools by social network site (SNS) users over PCs in at least four Asian countries”.
The report – ‘Examining Usage, Perceptions, and Monetization: The Coming of Age for Social Network Sites in Asia/Pacific’ maintains that “more than 50 per cent of respondents in China, India, South Korea and Thailand access social networks such as Facebook weekly via mobile phones.
“In China and Thailand, 62 per cent and 65 per cent of the respective respondents use mobile phones to get news alerts and notifications, receive and reply to messages, upload photos, or update personal status and profiles on popular SNS.
“On the other hand, 19 per cent and 25 per cent of the respondents in Australia and Singapore, respectively, registered the lowest percentage of users who access mobile versions of SNS weekly.”
It seems that whatever direction IT will take in the Year of the Tiger 2010, we can expect some sea change shifts in the way we use technology to communicate.
Ross O. Storey, currently the Managing Editor of Fairfax Business Media Asia, is responsible for the editorial content and production of MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia magazines.
