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Betting on Networking
By Michelle | April 13, 2008
The internet is a vast, mostly unexplored jungle that’s expanding rapidly with each passing day. Users all around the world go online to send email, chat, meet other people, watch multimedia, play games, catch up on the latest news, etc. But although the internet itself is global and its content (baring censorship) is available worldwide, it’s sometimes more accurate to talk of the various “internets” that people in different geographic locations use daily.
Take social networking, for example. This article on the blog “ReadWriteWeb” discusses Facebook’s inability to gain majority market shares in Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean markets. Likewise, this graphic from the French paper Le Monde illustrates the different penetration ratios of various blogging and social networking sites across the world.
There are schools of blogging techies that aren’t satisfied any of these “browser-based” networking sites and are instead holding out for the emergence of an exemplary mobile-device-based service before placing their bets. The “holy grail” for these networks, in the words of one writer is “physical presence detection and information exchange with other users.” In simple English, this means that when your mobile device “see’s” another person’s mobile device, then the two machines exchange information.
This authors continues: “Technical barriers aren’t an issue - cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones. What’s harder is just plain getting a critical mass of users.” So who will win the networking war? I’ve no idea, but frankly, I’d rather just turn my cellphone off.
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And on another note: Adobe, which recently launched Creative Suite 3, has created a promotion site called “Adobe Cards” as publicity. Although I’ve no intention of purchasing this software, the animation sequence is pretty neat. |
Topics: Internet, Randomness |