Since its genesis, the man kind has been the most 'attention seeking', 'self bragging' , 'self aware' species of all. This seems to have more to do of the Darwinian roots than the
intelligence. Since the good old days from the prehistoric period when someone invented the idea of adorning ones head with the feathers of 'a game' -- to inception over the ages of language and dancing, singing and painting, sculpturing -- to public speaking -- to warmongering -- to as recently, having ones personal profiles on the Internet, as the 21st century, the aspects of Social Engineering have evolved beyond ones imagination.
Talking about the socializing over the World wide Internet, the mesh of social networks exploded during early years of the 21st century with Friendster being the first of its kind. The eUniverse employees who had accounts on Friendster quickly recognized the value proposition and business case in socializing over the 'Net'. This resulted in the professional effort towards launching MySpace in Aug 2003, around the same time when Facebook’s prequel - The Facemash - was conceptualized. The acquisition of MySpace resulted in a deal of about $600 Mil in Jul 2005.
By this time, the social networking notion had picked up the momentum. And with Facebook’s Founder - Mark Zuckerberg - deciding not to sell his company , Facebook emerged as one of the best social interaction site gaining its popularity mainly in students in the US. In Sept 2007, after Microsoft bought 1.6% shares for around $240 Mil, Facebook’s valuation skyrocketed to around $15 Bil.
On the other coast in the United State, during mid 2004, Orkut Büyükkökten, a Google employee, came up with his own version of social networking. He named it with his first name - Orkut. It first became popular in the States but eventually spread all over the world with India and Brazil having the highest number of users.
And Then came the “Twitter”. Its based on a simple and seemingly benign concept of sharing personal updates in less than 140 characters. These updates, called as “Tweets”, help users tell each other what they are up to. Its equivalent to sending an SMS and works as a multicasting approach of sharing updates with other users. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has gained huge popularity across the globe. And with its users count reaching about 9.5 Mil by March 2009, It is not surprising to hear the rumors that Twitter’s bid has crossed the $1 Bil valuation mark. Across the board, the valuation estimates are based upon how much a single user account on these sites gets evaluated to. There are other news claiming Big players such as Apple showing interest in buying Twitter, though i don’t see a strong business case here.
With the rise of about 150 of such social networking sites, terms like ‘scraps’ became pretty common amongst young generation. These players follow mostly advertising based revenue model , the best example being Google’s AdSense. Other players such as Yahoo and Microsoft were too late to catch up losing market revenue share in the social engineering arena.
Apart from using ads postings, Twitter might pursue following scenarios for revenue generation.
1. They may come up with "Pro Services" for entities such as the Police and other Govt Organization, public service organizations , media including the press for multicasting their tweets to the users. For universities interested in broadcasting short announcements to their students, Twitter’s this approach may earn them good money.
2. They may provide Pro tweeting services for individual players like artists , politicians for announcing their upcoming events.
These are my speculations for the business case of "Pro Users" for posting updates to users who “Follow” them. But Twitter may think about charging money for posting updates to those users who aren’t following your tweets thus infringing the privacy. But i think this will results in more of a spamming problem.
People have already been using social networking sites such as Twitter for good social causes. Recently during Southern Californian fires, people were giving fire updates to each other to help them evacuate safely. Other sites such as Orkut provide the essential podium for strong healthy social debates over variety of topics. This further helps in cross-cultural exchange of values. This certainly is making the world come closer than ever before.
There is other side to social engineering as well - a darker one. About twitter, a user expressed following comments in a public forum. :-
“Twitter is something that again shows the true face of our present society's attention seeking unstable egos. We have to know everything about everyone so we can compare our lives to others just to see if were worth more, less or about the same. Is this really how we want to spend our time? ....”
There have been incidences such as fraud, impersonations, cheating, false propaganda, crimes against women committed through these social networking media like Orkut. In India, Police have registered many such complaints.
There are other other social experiments on the Internet as well. Youtube has emerged as one of the most favorite places to share personal videos. And with Google backing its engine, it is no doubt the best as far as user interaction and experience is concerned.
Finally, as an ever exploring species, we will keep on pursuing newer and more sophisticated ways to tell others about ourselves. And I think this is just the beginning of our efforts of socializing over the Internet. With the notion of cloud computing still in its early stages, we must expect more and (may be) better ways of socializing on the internet in the near future.
Reference: Hail Google :-)
