Social: Surging
Social media, led by Facebook’s virtual monopoly, is driving the daily use of the Internet in India. One never wants to be away from friends and the extended family for too long! Old classmates are being found, photos are being shared and tagged, the day’s trivia make up the personal headlines. Social media is filling in life’s free moments – both on the Internet and on the mobile.
In some ways, Facebook has become what Windows was in the 1990s – the new platform. The magnetic pull that it exercises with everyone else being there becomes hard to resist. Sites like Linkedin are doing the same for professional connections. So, no one is more than a few hops away.
The implications for other portals is that they have to start putting people at the centre. A new book, “Grouped” by Paul Adams, explores this theme in much more depth. The result is the news we read, the searches we do, the eCommerce portals we browse, the videos we watch – all of these will start having the filter of the social graph that we have so meticulously built. The web will become personal, through the lens of our friends.
Continued tomorrow.
