Who in this world does not know Facebook? Over the last 4 years Facebook has become the defacto place for finding your long lost friends, building fan pages and gaining support for worthy causes. Facebook has seen such success that last year they clocked past the 500 million user mark and attracted the world’s major organisations to create pages and to advertise Facebook logos all over the place. You can hardly watch a TV ad these days without seeing a “Visit us on Facebook” added to the advert. So yeah, I would say Facebook has been a whopping success.
But it seems Google does not share the world’s enthusiasm to Facebook and once again is digging their fingers into yet another slice of pie to further try and dominate the world. Google announced their new social networking site called PlusOne which at this stage is only available to those with an invite because, like most Google products, it’s still in a beta phase. Prior to this announcement Google introduced a new PlusOne button to their search engine and provided the API to webmasters to use on their web sites, as can be seen at the top of this post. This effectively allows you to promote certain search results to your socialite friends on Google PlusOne, pretty much a carbon copy of the Facebook LIKE button just with a different name.
My biggest question is who really has time for yet another social networking site? Facebook already dominates most people’s lives and you can walk into virtually any company right now and you would find a great precentage of employees stuffing around on Facebook. Now with Google PlusOne people will have to find even more time to say what they want across multiple networks. Of course you can download a piece of software that will do it for you but really what’s the point? Is it really necessary to let the same friends know that you just ate breakfast but now across multiple networks, seems like an awful waste of time to me.
If anything it shows how we have degraded as a human race. We have tossed personal communication in the waste bin favouring online social networks, yet in all honesty there is nothing “social” about sitting in front of a computer screen or being tied to a mobile phone all day long.
Will social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and PlusOne eventually result in the human race evolving into beings that no longer need to speak? (Scene from the Matrix)
Many of the people on Facebook these days could hardly hold down a 5 minute conversation in person but can blabber on every 5 minutes of the day when they have a keyboard in front of them. I can only see Google’s PlusOne adding to this very big problem with human communication. You can tell how it’s affected us a race by watching the teenagers of today and how they communicate with each other. They can not get by without Mxit, Facebook or Twitter, I’ve seen groups of teenagers all sitting in a row, not uttering a word to each other but instead texting and messaging each other with their phones …. but they’re sitting right there next to each other … how daft.
I have little hope for the future of our race, we may just lose the ability to speak with our mouths in the next 100 years ….. that’s what I call progress !!!
