The New Social Internet

I was just reading this article in The Age and I can’t help wonder a couple of things that are glaringly obvious about the future of the Internet (apart from the fact we’re all headed towards a massive cyber war sooner or later).

Here are some of the statistical nuggets presented in the Article:

• 40% of all Australian’s are now using Social Networking sites
• The volume of content on the Internet increased by 57% in the year to June 2010, mostly due to Social content
• Facebook accounts for 81% of time spent on all Social Networking sites
• The biggest share of Facebook users (27%) are aged between 35 and 49

Well, as we already suspected, Facebook certainly is the centrepiece of all Social Networking sites, and not just for Gen-Y as some people incorrectly assume, and I know that for some Internet users, Facebook is the Internet – and this comes about because they rarely venture away from the Facebook.com site itself, except perhaps to do some essential things like check e-mail.

So, it is no surprise to hear rumored that Facebook may be releasing their own answer to a hosted e-mail service like Gmail, and this would seem very logical especially given that most users already have unique “usernames” that would easily be prepended to a facebook.com e-mail address.

Ironically, just how the web itself has dominated the traffic of the Internet (since the Internet is capable of carrying other types of services), we’re now seeing a major provider dominate the web (since the Web is capable of carrying other websites!).

Behold the exciting experiment that plays out before us all.  That is all I can say!