It seems that the social networking phenomenon is taking hold in almost everything we do. Everything has a community that passes comment or feedback on a select list of products to help us of course. We are going to trust what people we don’t know say? Or is there some safety in numbers? Does it really influence our decision to buy? Will this drive improved quality in products? Is this the ‘unseen’ sigma?
Twitter is gaining some serious reputation (despite having been around a number of years) and connecting you and me, the average Londoner to any celebrity and/or random we choose to follow. OK, people like Stephen Fry are funny but to truly ‘follow’ him I would need an iPhone and be continually checking to see if he’s updated anything.
Will this help us rid the world of trash mags? Nope, it won’t. Not everyone will ever be techno-confident. There are always those that will subscribe to ring tone messages and stupid game downloads that charge £1.50 a shot everything you receive a message. It’s like handing a blank cheque to that annoying frog thing that had a number 1 hit and never using a phone for what it was intended – to speak to someone on.
So now we have phones that we use to send text messages and emails to people on rather than close the talking gap and solve the issues up front. Don’t get me wrong, I do love technology but you can spend years of your life chasing it and never really using something to it’s full potential. For example, I always used my iPod Nano to listen to music on. It’s only recently that I’ve ripped some DVDs I have to it and watch those as well. Next stop, podcasts – stop me now you crazy man….imagine if I had an iPhone – I’d never get anything done.
Facebook and Twitter – fundamentally the same but very different. Until Twitter sell out to application development and make it more than it needs to be…something else will come along. Right now I’m off to find out the best chocolate digestive to buy based on the customer feedback at my local supermarket – I’d hate to be disappointed you know 
Tags: Communities, Facebook, Twitter