I can't breathe without my social network

picture from http://www.grooveking.com/

So what's next? Did we really expect that this was the end all, be all of social networks? Every new technology continues to evolve to the point where we look back at our brick like cell phones of the early 90's and think, "i wouldn't be caught dead carrying that now." The same holds true for social networks, someday we are going to look back and laugh at it's primitive nature back in the good old days of 2008.

According to this article, Charlene Li believes that social networks will become as ubiquitous as air. Li writes that there will be four components to the social network development: 1) Universal Identities, 2) A single social graph, 3) Social context for activities, and 4) Social influence defining marketing value.

So instead of having profiles all over the web (on our flickr accounts and on our facebook accounts and everywhere in between) we will have one identity that we can manage from one place. Instead of incomplete social networks, our friends and acquaintances will be tracked and added to our network. And so forth with the technological advances.

I think it's true that it's only a matter of time and technology before social networks become just another part of the internet that we hardly think twice about, like googling. We can no longer sit back and pretend that social networks are just the toys of the global youth, social networks will soon be the means to and/or the control of our every connection.