The Future of Social Networking

Occasionally I get a psychic vision of the future. Rather then keep that revelation to myself, I go the path of Nostradamus and share it with the world. I've shared with you The Future of Television, and now I present to you, The Future of Social Networking. The only thing that I ask in return is for my visions to be collected in a tome, for release upon my death, so that future generations will know my word.

We've watched social networking blossom and grow in the past few years. From the archaic sites of old to Twitter, social network sites have de-evolved more and more over a small amount of time. More and more simple by the day, maybe DEVO should have preached about this.

But what's next? Well, my Nostradamus-like mind can answer that very question for you right now, but let's take a few steps back first. When Myspace was the hot new site, people would get into the code of their pages and customize their profiles with all sorts of annoying crap that no one wanted to look at. Soon that became too much work, so websites sprung up to do it for you.

The Facebook came along and streamlined the whole process... by getting rid of it entirely. And who wanted to bother actually browsing through their friends profiles to see what they wrote or changed? Facebook just notified you whenever someone did anything that somehow involved you.

Now the newest site on the block is Twitter, which has collapsed all of this nonsense down to the simplest possible formula. An avatar and 140 characters is all you need to interact with your friends. Twitter may think they have the most streamlined social networking site that will ever exist, but I see things much differently.

I have seen a vision of the future, and it is called Gruntter. Typing out an actual thought is too much work. In the future, we will use grunts to communicate our thoughts and feelings. No longer will you see this:


acronkyoung I've had a really good day today. I got a new job, and feel great, and found out my wife is pregnant!

Instead, you will see something more like this:

acronkyoung





Personally, I'm looking forward to it. I already respond to most questions with some sort of grunt, so I can't wait until I can parlay this into the online world. And imagine if this idea works its way into blogging as well. Instead of a long winded rant about the latest superhero movie not living up to some nerd's expectations, it could just be the title of the movie and then an audio clip of someone screaming like an angry gorilla for 30 seconds. I don't know about you, but I think that would only make the Internet a little more intelligent.