Why social?
The hottest web concept in the year 2007 is certainly social networking. The market value of FaceBook is expected more than $15 billion after Microsoft acquired 1.6% FaceBook shares. Internet giants like Google also took expressing actions upon this area. Google launched a project named "OpenSocial" and tries to create a standard for social applications, although "OpenSocial" is now still a startup project, lots of web 2.0 companies declaring to support it and the brand of Google make us believe it will make more implications on social networking, maybe boost the trends significantly in the next few years.
Yet, networking has shaped the world through such a deep level. why we still need to be social? or Why social networking is better?
There may be thousands of answers about this question since different people has different perspectives about Web and its affect on our his/her life.
In my point of view, there are two distinguished reasons.
1. People are social and yet in the same time, LONELY. Though the information technologies make communicating probable almost any time, any where. though the globe is emerging into a smaller and smaller village, we cannot say people are becoming closer than before. We can meet our old friends, classmates, event family members on the Internet everyday, yet we may just ignore them because we are "busy". In the IT era, it's much easier to talk with our friends long distance away, In the deep side of our soul, we desire to be appreciated, cared and loved, however, the bridge from heart to heart can never be just built upon fast and convenient communication technologies. but this is been changed by the social networking, social networking is not only technology, but much more a social way to build real connections in the virtual Internet world. We can easily know more detailed information about our friends, their daily activities, books, blogs, games, favourate music and films, and also friends' friends. The real social relationships are also copied to the networking world and gain the fast and obvious interactions. After several years growth, social networking is showing up with more humanities.
2. People trust their families and friends much more than virtual friends in the Internet. Before the social networking appears, we also talk with friends online by emails, news groups, bbs, instant messagers. Yet they are more likely to be only online friends. they have nearly no impact on us when offline. There is a well known saying "nobody knows whether it's a dog sitting in the other side of Internet". Internet seemed to be too unreal in the last several years, and many early Internet fans were accustomed to separate their online life against their "TRUE" offline life. But since social networking comes to our life, Internet is real too. Our online friends are probably our real friends. What they do online may affect us offline, so there maybe some services like health communicating will be more applicable.
Anyway, social networking will put more and more implications on us, you must have your own reason to like this new(maybe not) concept.
We are social beings, and technologies can only conform to our nature other than being obstacles.