The Great Social Convergence

Over the last few years, social networking has revolutionised how we communicate with our friends, family, and the outside world.  The revolution first started with websites like FriendsReunited, that for the first time gave users an easy way of getting back in contact with people they had lost touch with, but this was somewhat limited to just a basic profile page and if you wanted to actually get in contact with people you had pay a fee (or try and cleverly add an email or web address into the text of your profile without the administrators finding it).  The problem with paying for social networking is that the masses will look for a free alternative elsewhere and this was the next stage in the revolution, thanks to sites like MySpace and Facebook, with both sites offering fun and free ways to stay in touch, as well as a way to follow your favourite celebrities.

 

Now with the likes of Twitter and the fledgling Audioboo also being added to the mix, you could be forgiven for thinking they will need to ditch one or more of these sites as time constraints mean you can't keep all of your various profiles up to date.  But not to worry, because there is the next stage in the social revolution and it is coming from a convergence of the various social networking and blogging sites, which are making it possible for you to update your status and send pictures to the various sites just the once.  For example, in the last few months I have become a user of Twitter and find it a lot of fun, but as I was already an avid Facebook user, which meant trying to keep both sites with my status.  But thankfully I only need to do this once, because to quote Apple 'There's an App for that', which means anything I post to Twitter (excluding replies to other tweets) appears on Facebook as a normal status update, which is becoming more commonplace between most of the sites

 

A good example of 'The Great Social Convergence' comes from a site called Tumblr, which is a relatively unknown blogging website which lets you update direct with text/photos/audio/video but will also update your blog with RSS feeds, either directly from the link or by entering your username for the sites Tumblr has listed, which you can do for up to 5 different sites.  The end result is that you don't really have to update Tumblr direct at all, because it can just run the feeds from your other networks (so tweets from Twitter, video's from YouTube, your blog from Wordpress, photos from Flickr, the list goes on), which means that you have another complete online social presence which requires next to nothing to maintain, it also generates an RSS feed for your blog which also includes these other feeds.

 

So as we look to the future, I can certainly see social convergence being a bigger selling point for a social network, especially as more and more people are updating on the move from their portable devices.

 

After all, what could be easier than just clicking send once?