By Hassan Soukar.
The last five years has been the rise of the Social Network as a utility platform. Now that it’s created, the next five years will be about building on that foundation. New social apps are due to focus on sharing with select groups of people in that sense. The Era of The Social Network has ended, and we are now entering The Era of the Social Loop.
To demonstrate how this change happening, let’s turn to birthday parties. When a pre-schooler has a birthday party they invite the entire class, which comprises everyone they’ve ever met. It’s not until years later that they develop friendships and social loops that form the basis of inviting one person over the other.
Social Networks are akin to that pre-schooler’s party—they are repositories of people whose existence you acknowledge. You connect with everyone you’ve ever met as the tools have not been developed to produce more complex social loops that make up mature adult relationships. It makes sense that the evolution of digital social will follow the same developmental conduit we take as humans.
Social Loops will focus on groups, automatically created based on a person’s real life social loops. They will tend to include new close friends and remove those that become distant.
“Friends” will come to mean the same thing as it does in the real world, a group of people whom you share a close connection with. Content will be shared selectively with those that it’s most relevant to, mirroring the intimate sharing of real-life friendships.
