“I’m not sure what we should call this group of apps. Presence updaters? Microbloggers? Social networkers? ” [Jaiku/Twitter/Facebook/Kyte/Plaxo – Pay Attention! via WebProNews] 

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Social media networks are slowly infiltrating our lives.

Well, mainly mine (haha) and most, but not all of my friends. It honestly surprises me when people say “Oh, but I don’t check [insert random social media site]” if they have an account or if I discover they check their email as infrequently as a week. Perhaps they aren’t at a position in life that necessitates checking their email or keeping track of RSS feeds (be it for news, entertainment or business purposes) but I am! Guilty of checking my email 24/7, that is. It’s not crazy, I get mail at all hours. 

I started two weblogs in the last two months and it’s becoming a bit of an obsession for me to update them. Every time I find stumble upon something interesting to purchase and/or ponder upon, I open up another text file and start drafting another post. I have multiple drafts sitting on my desktop, waiting to be completed, edited, and published. Having a blog is like it’s own 4 unit Online Journalism course, but it’s not time-consuming or as exhausting in the same way a real course would be. Blogging allows me to spill out all the thoughts I have during the course of the day; it’s quite relaxing.

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“Personal publishing is more than just text, it spans all media. Videos, music and photos are just as important…Sites like MySpace and Facebook are better bigger than blogging sites because they enable people to connect, communicate and share with each other in richer and easier ways than blogging does.” [Why Facebook is Bigger Than Blogging via 25hoursaday]

Social media networks cleverly fulfill and take advantage of the human need to communicate. The only problem is that at the moment there are so many options – these social media websites tend to have distinct functions – that your online presence is doomed to be fragmented. You’d get social-media-overload from trying to maintain a Blog and a Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Dopplr/PlaceShout/MySpace/Jaiku or any combination of the slew online applications available for communication, collaboration, multimedia, and entertainment. The other problem would be having all of your friends’ updates saturating your inbox slash friend-feed. I’m refusing to join in on the disastrous clutter. What we need next is something to organize all these different applications in one place.

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“At what point do we finally peak and have some universal social media dashboard?…The Facebook news feed comes closest, but it only highlights some of the updates even from people I want to follow closely.” [To Twitter or Not to Twitter? via WebProNews]

“One day, I can imagine Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offering full search/social/traditional media advertising packages that pull all of these things under one roof – a managed campaign offering.” [Microblogging: What Is It Good For? via WebProNews ]

Facebook has the potential of becoming that all-encompassing social media network that will aggregate and organize everything else into one place. I suspect that in the future everyone will be connected to the internet 24/7, which by then, will be massively mobile social media network feeding us updates about people and events happening around the world.

We will be constantly connected to each other, and together we will form so many intersecting points in a politico-econo-socio-cultural web. The datastream will be instantaneous, perpetual and unbearable unless we are able to efficiently collect & filter out all the noise. I think we need something better than Facebook – now, THAT would be futuristic (and big money).

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We already are seeing situations where social media supplants traditional media in speed, accuracy, and efficiency for the distribution of breaking news or emergency information:

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In conclusion, social media networks are the the way of the future!

And I really, really need an ultraportable laptop, which I will dub my blogtop, to keep up my blogging habit (reading & writing). This is an epic milestone: I’ve chosen a piece of electronics over a pair of shoes.