Online social networking frenzy points to Internet's future

Story about the huge growth and potential of social networking on the web...big corporations, healthcare organizations, etc.  are using FaceBook as one example of  "Cloud" technology...are you in the cloud yet?  If you read through the articles it will help describe how software as a service has and is integrating in to everything we do on the web today....and the Cloud is coming to cellular mobile devices soon...

Here's an example with HealthCare...Facebook Organ Transplant Group...and another good resource page...Hospital Impact which will give you some additional examples of social networking in Healthcare...they list the Mayo Clinic, Partners Healthcare, CEO Paul Levy's blog (which is also listed here under the blog roll and vice versa) .... BD

Quote:  "The bottom line is this: While some hospitals are embracing social media, hospitals as a whole won't be getting into social media anytime soon. But, many patients will. And as such, hospitals that take the plunge as early adopters will be well-known as savvy and transparent"

 

Every person that joins a social network adds more value to the network than the prior person did.  The value of the network grows exponentially.  There will be more layers added to the cloud, and over time it will become harder and harder to ignore. 

There will be economic advantage to those who embrace the new ways, and penalties for those who don’t.

At the very least, you need to get yourself educated about what these kinds of services offer and what they mean. Welcome to the brave new world of utility cloud computing.

Online social networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar this year as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities. Industry statistics show Facebook membership more than doubled in the past year to about 55 million, while reigning champion MySpace grew 30 percent to top 110 million.

A Top Ten list compiled by the world's most-used search engine includes British website Badoo, Spanish-language Hi5, and US-based Facebook. Microsoft recently paid 240 million dollars for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook.

Video-sharing websites YouTube and Dailymotion are on the list, along with the Club Penguin online role playing game where children pretending to be the flightless birds "waddle about and play" together.The world has only seen "the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to online social networking, says MySpace vice president of business development Amit Kapur.

Online communities and virtual worlds are forums for commerce, advertising and business meetings, said Owyang.

Online social networking frenzy points to Internet's future - Yahoo! News

Read about Amazon's interest in the "Cloud" below....BD

First, there is a huge migration of software underway to the cloud.  In other words, software that is never installed on your machine or in your company’s datacenter. 

It resides in the cloud and comes to you via the browser.  Examples include SaaS on the business side and the vast armada of consumer Web 2.0 products such as Facebook.  No category is safe from this trend, not even traditional bastions as should be clear from the growing crop of Microsoft Office competitors that reside in the cloud.

Second, this migration leads to centralization.  The mere act of building around a cloud architecture, even if it is a private cloud in your own company’s datacenter, leads to centralization.

There is much interesting cloud-related news in the blogosphere.  Various pundits are sharing a back and forth on the potential for cloud centralization to result in just a very few datacenters and what that might mean.  The really big news is Amazon’s fascinating new addition to their cloud platform of SimpleDB. 

Related Story:  http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/to-rule-the-clouds-takes-software-why-amazon-simpledb-is-a-huge-next-step/