Social Networking: Raging Trend

Point: Is the trend tracking of social networking looking at audiences' shifting media habits?

Spend any time looking at connected audiences in personal networks, and you bump into the term "social networking". You'll find buckets of words on the trend, but not that much (yet) about participants abandoning or altering their consumption of traditional media in favor of the social interactions.

Corante is THE Web place to explore the musings of the top thoughtleaders in social networking.

A recent excerpt:

Sales of camera phones with outpace cameras and phones within five years. The fastest growing consumer electronic device hasn’t yet been matched with robust sharing services, save Photologs and Moblogging. These are the fastest growing segments of social media and Incumbents are catching on.

People spend time with other people. 2 Hours Per Visit on Friendster.

We have an innate human need to mess with media and make artifacts their own (call this a plausable generalization). What you share makes us care.

Countries and cultures like the US and UK have a latent demand for social capital.

Pull models of attention management and social networks as filters are solutions for attention scarcity and information abundance.

Relatively low costs for personal publishing, group forming and network management are expanding markets from the supply side.

Above all, ease of use. Simple tools yield complex results.

One topic is that venture capital is circling around the trend.