At some point Google, like facebook and all the rest, will ‘un-hide’ the fact that they don’t have 100m users – what they probably have is 100m sign-ups but only 5m users – and by users I mean self promotors – and by self promotors I mean those that are blinded by the bubble that is social media.
Only the tiniest of the minority use it as a social activity.
Because we all want different things.
Essentially an iPhone is part plastic, metal, chips and batteries and much like any computer really only serves one purpose, and only one – it’s an interface between you and binary.
It’s an API. All a keyboard does is make sense of what you’ve got to say or do and translate that into a digital piece.
But that’s the problem. If social media is ‘the conversation’ then the platforms they are on can’t be.
Facebook is not social media as much as a cave wall is not social media – the painting on it is. Platforms cannot be social media, digital cannot be social media, they can only be a place where social media, at some level, takes place.
Therefore, if 2012 is the year that we become exhausted with social media (platforms), and i hope we do, then what is it people have been doing?
Having a conversation methinks – it just happens that it was on something like facebook or twitter.
But I think facebook and twitter were too ‘wide’ a platform, i.e not niche enough. We know humans herd, and we know humans subscribe to specific uniforms such as golfing or mountain biking. Therefore, what we need are ‘dashboards’ that allow that subscription to be fulfilled.
