Where will social networking be in 5 years?

The future of social networking has littered the press in recent weeks… in fact, it was almost in danger of taking the mantle off Piggy flu. But what lies ahead for the social networking giants? Will the nation’s youth continue its love affair with Facebook? Will Twitter maintain to dominate the micro-blogosphere? And will MySpace finally choose a direction and stick to it?!!

We asked Dubit member, Claudia, for her thoughts…

By definition, a social network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations tied by specific types of inter-dependency, such as friendship or a relationship of beliefs. In reality, a social network is much more than this…

My personal preference is Facebook – the UK’s most popular social networking site – for the simple reason that everyone is on it; why would I need to sign up to anything else when all my friends are on one large network?

I find that there is also a certain satisfaction to using these social networking sites - Facebook in particular allows us to see into other people’s lives without having to ask: this summer’s holiday, or perhaps last weekend’s antics all readily available in just a few clicks.

However, as amazing as these social networking sites are, they all have downsides. Safety is a huge issue: parents understandably panic over letting their children post all their personal information online where almost anyone can access them. Although networking sites are becoming a lot more cautious about identity theft, there is still the available option some choose to allow anyone on the net to look at their personal information.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Friendster; any social networking site you can think of all have the unavoidable problem of false identity - anyone can create an account, pretending to be someone they’re not. This could lead to cyber-stalking and even harassment - definitely not something we want to face.

So is it really worth the risk just to waste precious hours of our lives chatting to our friends in a more effortless, impersonal and lazy way, when actually we should be encouraging our youth to develop their communication skills in person and get outside rather than stay at home in front of the computer screen all day?

Personally, I think they are great creations - the gift of virtual conversations is one we should appreciate and social networking sites such as Facebook take this one level higher. However there is an unhealthy level of addiction – especially among young teens – that will inevitably become worse over the next 5 years.

So, what I’d like to see from these social sites is a more real approach: removing the many pointless applications that appear for people to use, such as ‘HonestyBox’. Such applications are there for one thing and one thing only, to generate money.

This is something that we are now subject to from an early age: advertising.

Will it decline over the next 5 years… no!! Social network sites are big new, both in advertising and revenue. Since there humble urban beginnings, they have quickly turned into money driven juggernaut hurtling towards the big city – with their sights on the financial district.

So… where will social network sites be in 5 years time? Who knows… maybe the new T.V?