The mighty Social Networking - A new identity

Whats your current digital signature? If it only contains your name, email address & phone number then I'm sorry to say that your technical know how is outdated. Today a signature is incomplete without a Facebook, Twitter & Blog id. I noticed a recent trend where even in business presentations professionals instead of writing their names identify themselves just through www.facebook.com/myname or @myname in their first introduction slide. These new social networking tools have become the face of every individual & possesses the power to define them completely starting from their personal bio data, pictures, likes, dislikes, hobbies, siblings, friends, relationship status, profession, opinions, testimonials & what not. One can know everything about a person & how he/she has spent his/her life till now in just a few clicks.

Just a few stats to show the rising popularity of some of these networks.

Facebook

Founded in 2004, Facebook has registered 400 million users in less than 6 years.

People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums etc.) shared each month.

Twitter

Twitter currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.

Around 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets per second.

During NBA finals 2010, a record was set where fans posted around 3,085 tweets per second.

Social Networking started as a platform where one person can meet with other people on the Internet. But today social networking has evolved to take an entirely different connotation. Now it's the way the 21st century communicates, share, express, emote, develop professional alliances, find employment, expand business reach. Even social networking have started playing roles which no one could have ever imagined.

Platforms like Facebook & Twitter are playing the role of the most real time news portals where people share news & events happening around them. This brings them in the league of social news. Also there are lots other applications around social networks like social shopping, social albums, social voting, social gaming, advertising & marketing, and the most disruptive of all social search.

Facebook has become a major threat to the search engine giant - Google. Social search can bring revolution in the field of search as it will give much better results since it will be real time & more relevant to a particular user. Social search focus on ranking search results according to one's social graph on social networks. It will be like every user having their own personalized search engine which gives results which are most relevant to them only based on their background, likings, tastes, preferences, browsing history, friends network, communities etc.

Moreover mobile devices have intensified the usage of social networking where people easily update their Facebook & Twitter profiles via their mobile phones while on the move.

The world of social media has just started to unfold its prowess & there is much more potential in it which will manifest itself very soon.