The evolution of the social web

The evolution of the social web over the past 24 months has been fascinating.

We are kind of witnessing a social revolution within the social revolution. Social web 2.0.

It looks like the world went perhaps too open too quickly and we have seen a revolt. Many young teenagers shifted their social network activity from Facebook to the more private sphere of Instagram and from there they moved to Snapchat, where your picture gets deleted in a flash, no one can see it, save it, archive it and share it around town.

We have witnessed a backlash against many aspects of the social network revolution that most of Generation Y were unhappy with. Facebook allowed people to share, to open up and connect with the world, but it restricted individuals from sharing privately in a fun social manner. Also Snowden exposing the NSA’s snooping of FB profiles undermined Facebook’s attempts to maintain user privacy as well as the implementation of new sharing rules without explicit user consent.

We have almost gone full circle. Secrets were bad in Silicon Valley, now they love them, with the Secret app taking Silicon Valley by storm in the past year. People are enjoying speaking in a social forum where there words cannot be traced back to them. Anonymous sharing is the new buzz happening on the social web. Trust is still the underlying ingredients in all these networks. Once this breaks down, then there will be no community and no exchange of these ideas.

People were once willing to listen to people who they were close to online and Facebook allowed the exchange of ideas through networks such as universities and schools. Now there is an exchange of ideas happening through anonymous  peer to peer networks and many people are yearning for privacy. Will this connect us further or make us grow further apart?

 

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2014: Still living in the 20th century?

2014: Still living in the 20th century?