Social Networks and Popularity

Remember when social networks were the new thing? Facebook was an infant on the doorstep of every college or university in the country. Myspace was a mere idea in Tom’s brain. Ultimately, there is a trend to almost all social web innovations; they become popular.

Having a popular site is what the Internet is all about. But with popularity also comes interest from the marketing community. Most recently, we see Yahoo and Google both taking action to get into the social networking market. The social networking sites have changed because of this. Some would say for the better, others would say for the worse.

This is not the first instance of social degradation. Think back to when instant messaging became popular and we began to see spam messages or ads displayed on our chat clients. In a more recent example, spam text messages seem to find their way to almost any phone no matter how careful you are.

Email has obvious problems with spam and even the Internet itself has the issue of pop-ups. But, as much as I’ve bad-mouthed these practices, they have made the Internet what is today: A popular area of society and commerce. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?