By the end of the post we won’t be running around like headless chicken’s so let’s get the picture of Mike out of the way now, actually I’ll leave it at the bottom of the post as not to offend any vegetarians.

It’s not often I see a tweet that makes me think, stuff flashes past you so fast now that it’s forgotten about thirty seconds later.  Then the odd gem arrives….

“in fact since i was about 12 i’ve always had something…MSN…Myspace…Bebo…Facebook…Twitter…what if it all ends? OH GOD” (shutupcaf)

I think it’s fair to say that the amount of investment given to social media over the last 8 or 9 years means that nothing will end in the near future.  It does raise the interesting question of “what’s next?” in the grand scheme of things.

The collective drain of excitement of getting status updates from people that you didn’t know (or care about that much in the first place) has been wearing thin with folk for a while now.  While from a technical standpoint Google+ is a cleaner system than Facebook I still don’t think it’s made the impact they were expecting.  Now the hype cycle is complete and the growth rate flattens out it’s now down to the residents to create the content.

The art of conversation still rules on the simple messaging platforms. Email, SMS and Skype.

My first foray into “social networking” goes back to 2001/2002 when I was playing around with FOAF and it’s links with RDF data.

@prefix rdf:  .@prefix foaf:  .@prefix rdfs:  . <#JW>    a foaf:Person ;    foaf:name "Jimmy Wales" ;    foaf:mbox  ;    foaf:homepage  ;    foaf:nick "Jimbo" ;    foaf:depiction  ;    foaf:interest  ;    foaf:knows [        a foaf:Person ;        foaf:name "Angela Beesley"    ] .     rdfs:label "Wikipedia" .

Not exatly fun to look at and “like/+1” but it was the start of something exciting.

The evolution of the tools that @shutupcaf mentioned shows an interesting timeline.  The whole MSN/ICQ/AOL instant messenger was all about the one to one communication.  MSN tried the whole groups and boards thing too. MySpace, is full of band stuff, Bebo was a teenager’s playground.

Orkut is still in use today, big in Brazil, and outstrips Facebook in other countries too.  Orkut didn’t have social media experts promising 4000 likes for the simple reason was no one cared.  We’ve been hooked and polluted over the last few years by people and all this social media expert nonsense.  Friendfeed still lurks in the wings and there’s obviously LinkedIn to consider too.  As these networks have been launched the hipsters go hunting for their trophy wares of “I was there when it first started”….. yeah, bite me I was there too….

So fear not @shutupcaf, it won’t end while there are investors pouring money in like it’s going out of fashion.  Here’s a list if you’re really bored 🙂

Now vegetarians…. turn your head away now! Everyone else can scroll down a bit….

Did you know Mike lived for 18 months after having his head cut off?