Wasif Malik > Blog

Evolution of Social Networks

// September 9th, 2009 // Featured Articles, Technology

The need to network and interact with each other has been growing at a fast pace lately. So what is it that persuades people to “network”? The simple answer is that it is human nature to interact and share.

What is a social network anyway? It is an entity that makes it easy to share and interact with people you know or you want to know. Try asking from your friends what social networks are and I am sure most of them would reply Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc are social networks. Perfect. Now go back ten years and ask the same question and you would not get any answer. Because there wasn’t any social network at that time you would say, right? Think again.

The landline telephone network, the postal service, the telegraph, mobile networks, television and radio have been here for ages and are all examples of social networks. All of these are entities that encourage people to share and communicate. The social networks of today are much efficient and have increased the frequency of interaction between known and unknown people by making it simple and easy to share and communicate. The question is how much sharing is good? Well, it totally depends on you. But there has to be a fine line between your public and personal life. There have to be some rules for online sharing. Sadly, there aren’t any at the moment. Even if there are, they keep changing at a rapid pace. Stuff that was considered to be private some years back is now considered to be “public”. Sharing and interacting with each other has been made so easy and seamless that sometimes it is hard to control the flow of information. What to share and what not to share is the million dollar question that needs to be answered by the users, the social media gurus and the creators of social networks.

The social networks have evolved and changed into something completely new and modern but they still rely on the most basic nature of humans, to communicate and to share. These networks have enabled us to share everything, but how do we absorb so much information? It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with this monstrous flow of information. What to absorb and what not to absorb is the second million dollar question. And the social network that will enable us to seamlessly absorb useful information and discard useless information will be the leader in the social networking space in the years to come.