Social media, based on emerging social networking principles and social/cultural psychology, has taken root and is becoming a more dominant part of our live. While there are no official industry statistics yet, Ben Parr has been tracking social media for some time and has noted an exponential growth in the usage of the term over that last three years.
Side Bar: If you want to follow this industry, there are many Googlable (I thought this was a real adjective, why is there a red line when I type) sites. Mashable is one of the sites I follow (Kindle and Web) for my weekly dose of vitamin “W/S”. They follow Web 2.0 and Social Media news across all industries, providing insights into technology as well as business trends.
Social media is a vertical and horizontal – it is both a “what you do” and “how you do it.” Unlike tradition verticals (first axis) like Financial and Healthcare or traditional horizontals (second axis) like SOA and Cloud computing, social media is both. System developers will build on top of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook apps) as well as build out social media capabilities (e.g., realtime analytics) – the third access.
Mashable contains many examples of this emergent third dimension. In a recent article “Facebook Platform Live Status Make Life Easier for Developers,” explored the impact on development. This tool provides an indication of the system health across many functions. Ask yourself this, “Should every system have this ability?” How often have you been frustrated with a system only to find out that it wasn’t you. Having access to this capability could make like easier and happier customers.
What about Real-time web – RT collaboration, analytics, search, Ecommerce, etc? It seems to be a necessity for many users, ask FaceBook, SAP, and Wise. Delivering realtime web content is very different, both architecturally and operationally, from delivering semi static content. So, as this trend becomes more mainstream, will you be ready/prepared to delivery it? Interesting implications to both sales and architects.
Social media is here and will most likely stay and continue to become a dominant force in our lives. A humans we want to be social, but the systems we have development in the past have been a barrier to this. Social media could be the catalytic that reorganizes not only the way we look at industries, but how we go about working in them.
Practical Aspects of Social Media: Art, Science, and Humanity 