The Generic Social Media Systems

Generic Social Media?

Irritation

Why is the social media becoming irritating? A "repeat" of the same? Admit it, you are connected to more than 5 individual social media. They have become boring, isn't it? Why are they boring? Where is the hype?

The irritation is shared by many. They are connected to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Netlog, Google+, Flickr, etc. etc..

To reach out to your friends / family / business connections, it is necessary to be "connected" to a host of these so called social media, each of them with each their peculiarity, lack of functionality, extra functions, reductions, facilities, features, ... They are all the same: Some text, Some Pictures, Videos, Buttons, put together in various designs/formattings to attract attention, but basically the same and the same... Boringly similar, all of them, in their difference.

For the viewer, these social media appears to more or less wrap their content around the very same basic features, though, with varieties in the way they appear to you. But it is all appearance. The basic features are the same: Text, Picture, Video, Buttons - the same.

What is this?

You are experiencing the convergence of social media, you are experiencing that to the human intellect, all those things are just same food in different containers.

You are experiencing that the generic social media has entered the stage.

To the trained eye, most social media owe their very existence to Facebook, where they have added a twist or tweek to Facebook, rebranded, and relaunched - even Facebook is now having serious trouble renewing itself, remaining "relevant" - without being just a copy-cat of the copy-cats who originally copied Facebook.

This market-dilution is a result of that nobody have taken the consequence of the generic social media, and thereby created the ultimate generic social media.

Similarity / Difference

What is the difference between the above mentioned, social media's?

• Wrapping
• Design Stringency / Composition
• feature focus

What is then the common denominator in these social media?

The user (member) can:

• Own a text, which can be edited/formatted - which can be categorized (ie message, blog, etc)
• Link to other users in various ways - networked, via others, hierarchical, direct
• Create hyper-links within the text - which can be formatted in various ways
• Embed or link to pictures / videos - editing them too / format them..
• Link to other social media in various ways

If you analyze the above similarities, you will find that only the number 2 - link to other users - is the sole cardinal distinguishability between one media and the other.

For instance; the ability to edit / format the text / pictures / videos, can be handled by a generic HTML/CSS editor, and so on and so forth.

Distinguishability

The link to others, is therefore the only thing which distinguishes one site from the other. The social media are all of them seemingly different, but all of them born by +Facebook

Since the formula for linking various persons with other persons is a mere question about the database organisation - that is: HOW will one link one person to another - then it is thereby possible to put the entire social media into a formula. The interesting thing is, that SMS and Email and the most recent +WhatsApp  spasm fits into the same formula, thereby allowing the generic social media to absorb these, too.

Thereby there is no reason anymore to have various "flavours" of social media, as they can all of them be represented by one system, a set of design rules, a set of linkage rules, a set of permissions.

Social Media Merging

With this in mind, the stage is set for the most enormous mergers of some of the biggest dot-com bubbles we have had in decades - namely the merger of all the big social media sites. There is - with the current technology - no reason to keep them separate. They can all pull from the very same, global, distributed database, and be represented in each their own way, by pulling from the very same database, apply each their individual "formula", display, interact, and earn.

It is the same kind of revelation, anti-climax which happens when an entire area has been mapped. There is nothing more to develop, no more to explore, no more news - it has all boiled down to business as usual - some billions of USD has changed hands, end of story.

The Generic Social Media Systems has thereby played themselves into a corner of boredom - Activity Fatigue, which will inevitably lead to their collapse, once the hype has ebbed out.

~ My 50 cents