The Words “Social Networking” Will Soon Be Anachronistic

At Forbes, Michael Noer predicts social networking will become fragmented and traffic will drop at ”one-size-fits-all” Facebook. He cites gdgt.com, the “social gadget platform” from the guys behind Engadget and Gizmodo as an example of what comes next. His bold prediction?

The very words “social networking” and “social media” will become wildly anachronistic within a very few years. Just as no one, except perhaps Al Gore, cruises the Information Superhighway these days and job openings for “Webmasters” are few and far between (though lots of people are hiring “Social Media Directors”) social media technologies will become so ubiquitous that the specialized terms used to describe them will disappear entirely.

It’s not that I disagree with anything he writes, it’s just that none of it strikes me as bold or outside the box of conventional wisdom. Though this comment is mildly amusing:

Actually pretty much everything about Twitter is misplaced, but most particularly the unseemly embrace of the technology by middle-aged, never-cool, media executives.

I have little doubt that Facebook will be to the oughts as AOL’s “walled garden” was to the nineties. I’m just not seeing a bold vision of what comes next.