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The New World Order of Social Networking

by Jonathan Akwue | Aug 27, 2009

The power of social networking and its impact on society has been highlighted in a forthcoming book by Erik Qualman, Socialnomics.

It’s easy to forget that the first social networking site - the now defunct SixDegrees.com, - only launched in 1997. Qualman argues that social networking is leading to monumental shift in social behaviour. Whether he is right or wrong remains to be seen, but he does list some fairly mind-blowing facts.

These include the length of time new technologies have taken to reach 50 million users:

Radio - 38 Years
TV - 13 Years
Internet - 4 Years
iPod - 3 Years
Facebook - 100 million users in less than 9 months

It would be interesting to create a parallel study looking at the speed of technology adoption within public services. While this might reveal a slower pace across the sector as a whole, the examples of social media being deployed by Steph Gray at BIS and others like him demonstrate that parts of the public sector are already at the forefront of the social media revolution.

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