As humans, the need to communicate with each other has been very strong. In fact, it leads to the invention of "speech" itself.  In a similar vein, Social Media has existed even before the advent of the internet. The ability to post our views, the ability to read others views and the ability to respond, has always been an attraction to all of us. With the internet coming, BBSes died and Usenet took over. Think of Usenet as a GIANT forum with number of channels, sub channels and sub-sub-channels. Anybody could access any post anywhere and respond! It was a mark of genius.

And now back to the present. Usenet is now the "underground" internet. Where pirates are rampant and hackers abundant. Usenet has been replaced with Facebook, Orkut, YouTube, FriendFeed and Twitter.

Every large website is now becoming more and more social. "Email a friend" is passé. We now "share" it on our Facebook and we "tweet" about it from our mobile phones. In this fast changing world and social media morphing into things we never imagined in the first place, there are a number of strong trends that are emerging.

1) The Mobile Phone: The phones we carry today have morphed into a number of things such as camera, Game Boy, organizer et al. But today, it is back to what it was meant to do. Help us communicate. The difference this time around, instead of traditional voice, it is helping us to write on walls, update our status, tweet the car accident down the street, upload our nephew cutting his birthday cake and catch our neighbour's cat trying to eat fish with a fork! The mobile phone is definitely the most "social" gadget of all in our households.

2) Location aware services: You are out from a meeting that lasted longer than you thought. It's 4 pm and most of the regular lunch joints aren't serving lunch anymore! But instead of cursing the client, you take out your mobile phone and it magically finds a Domino's Pizza outlet, an all day round coffee shop and a sandwich stall, all accessible within 100 metres from where you stand! Amazing, isn't it? Combining user generated content with location aware services is a powerful combination and is creating newer and more innovative products that we could ever imagine.

3) Mash Ups: This is the most exciting part of the Web 2.0 yet. Mash ups, as the name suggests, are a mash up of two or more services. Mash ups allow us to leverage what already exists and adds an entirely new dimension to things. For example, I recently downloaded an I-phone app called "Hear Planet". What it does is brilliant. You simply open it up and it instantly locates your presence via GPS. It then displays a list of PoI (Points of Interest) around my location. Once I choose a location that interests me, it downloads the Wikipedia article about it and then "speaks" it!

It's almost like science fiction! This app basically combines GPS with Google Maps and then "mashing it up" with Wikipedia and a text-to-speech service to give you a whole new way to exploring new places.

4) Microblogging: For a word that was not invented until a year back, this one has become "red hot". Microblogging is exactly what it says it is. Blogging but in a "micro" fashion. Look at the average teenager's Facebook profile and you'll see his status is updated multiple times a day. Log on to twitter and people from around the world creating huge amount of UGC (User Generated Content) every second. The variety of content that microblogging offers is vast. From someone saying something as mundane as "I am on my way to work" to something of more general interest such as "Check out the new Nike shoes at Phoenix Mills!" In fact news breaks faster on twitter than on most traditional news sources. The Mumbai terrorist attacks broke a full 19 minutes before on twitter than the first news channel picked it up. Even earthquakes in the past have broken on twitter way before they have found their ways into the CNNs and BBCs.

5) Television: The RIAA may still not have figured out a new model, but their peers in other forms of entertainment are surely embracing social media quickly. Perhaps, the most important and emerging trend in social media, is the birth of a new way of watching television. Of note is the television industry in the US . ABC, NBC and other top TV networks are tying up with the likes of YouTube and Hulu to distribute their content. Some companies such as uStream are gearing up to take TV to its next avatar, the "Social TV", where people can not only view the same content both also have a conversation around it, by adding texting and voice channels to the TV content stream.

It's an interesting time for all of us and Social Media is changing the way we live our lives, the way email changed how people and businesses communicate. Social Media is changing the way we conduct business, the way we interact with our friends and the way we live our lives!

This article is written by:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     GAUTAMM MEHRA

 Business-Head-Search Marketing- Ignitee India Pvt ltd