005: Week 11 Exercise - Active Research Assignment: Social Networking Exercise Pt.3

The Future of Digital Social Networking Services

Given my experience with social network and knowledge of the history of computer, internet, and interface design, I believe that in the future, what awaits us are even more details of our lives being shared on the internet. Before you know it, we may have pedometer devices that can record how many miles we’ve walked/driven/bicycled and share it on the net. Soon your credit cards might even have a device that will collectively gather all the kinds of food and materials you buy and see who else amongst your peers and others who share your favorite kind of store or type of food.

Advertisements may soon need not to create/write anymore aside from sending out daily spam of coupons and notifications of sales like I’m getting right now. You’ve got an unlimited array of people out there willing to share why you should buy this type of product or not and statistics have shown that people are more likely to listen to their peers’ pitch than a professionally paid one.

Essentially, I think, especially given the success of the micro-blogging sites such as twitter, we’ll just have a more range and need to share more of ourselves in a socially exhibitionist manner. We already can tweet by phone and on the computer; maybe soon we can do it on our cameras (which may already be the case with high tech camera phones nowadays), our television sets, videogames (actually I believe the PS3/X-BOX 360 already allows you to share accomplishments/feed it to your facebook), or even electronic kitchen appliances. Maybe we won’t even need to type anymore and a recording device can recognize words can help us blog/tweet orally or even post the recording itself (livejournal and possibly many more already have a “phonepost” option after all). Just imagine how much more prevalent netspeak will become than it already is now. I can already hear people consciously shouting “LOL!”