Emerging Trends in the Internet

I am back after a small hiatus to mull over some of the trends as I see them emerging (well, some of them have already ‘emerged’; only I am beginning to slowly understand them now!) The internet has passed over its novelty phase, at least in the so called developed world and showing signs of becoming a basic service that people expect. There are two side effects of this maturity - the customer’s real self has started to show on the net (demanding, selective, looking for 'value' rather than 'experience') and possible consolidation in the industry. The richness and reach of internet is peaking in developed countries but both are increasing in emerging markets - this might cause the balance of the speed of innovation to shift towards emerging markets. However, whether it will really translate into real business is still to be seen - more than on this later.

The second trend and the popular one is social networking, though I am yet not educated enough to declare that it a real business trend or just a fad (if valuations of companies like Facebook are anything to go by, this seems to be the biggest trend in the industry, but it is yet to be seen if valuations are based on real revenues or just an aura created by M&A hungry wall street analysts.) Let me dive in by classifying the internet networking into three parts - social networks (http://www.orkut.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.myspace.com, etc.), content networks (http://www.digg.com, http://www.flickr.com, http://www.YouTube.com, etc.) and professional networks (http://www.linkedin.com, http://www.openbc.com, http://www.connectbuzz.com, http://www.businessnetworkingme.com, etc.)

If we closely look at it, social networks try to bring back some old world charm to our cyber lives - a close knit community where we can anything and everything with people we might or might not know in the real life. I still remember the small colony of around 200 families where I spent my childhood - all the people knowing almost all, either directly or indirectly, decision making (at least about buying products) being more social than individual and the word of mouth being the most important opinion maker. The social networks seem to give the same feeling to people like me. On the other hand, they empower the individuals to convey an opinion or message on an international stage, if not make it count.

As the opinion of the community starts counting in want of a differentiator in a product or service, any good or bad publicity can be a very potent reason for success or failure of a product or service. This is making organizations circumspect if not heavy advertisers on these channels. They definitely don't want negative publicity on the net for their product or service. Also, as these networks tend to be groups of people with similar tastes, likes and dislikes, it is possible to do very deep targeting - something that eluded the advertisers worldwide so far, which makes the social networks a ripe target for advertisement dollars. Now will it really flow in and provide greater ROI is yet to be seen. One problem is on how to do advertising in a very non-intrusive way so that not to influence the basic nature of social interaction happening on the social network.