The new year is around the corner. I feel is about time we look back some of the events that had shape the world of social media in 2010.  The sequence or numbers of each event by no means dictate how important that event against another, but merely a list of 3 events.

Facebully : When a mass crowd turn into an exclusive community and re-dictate freedom of speech.

While Google still reign in unique no of visitors but Facebook reign in term of time spent on site. While Google facing problem entering China, Facebook is facing privacy issue and more severely racism, non-sensitive to other religions belief plus not excluding other religious teaching and figures depiction.

We could say China is trying to protect their own market by preventing Google from entering China but in case of Facebook is more of serious flaws in internal policy. An internal policy should be dictated by the organisation but in this case, it was dictated by the mass crowd. We can accept crowd-sourcing but crowd-dictation, an event where the mass dictate an organisation policies and actions (not the shareholder or board of directors) that is so chaotic.  In using their application, we entered into a carrot and stick condition, giving away our privacy (included our friends) for a crowd entertainment.

As a result, a stir of balance between the crowd majority, middle and minor had pushes the crowd to shift and form or join various other entities or just left and even create a successful facebook clone. If that not serious why is there a necessity a soft begging plead when you try to leave facebook.

Socionomic : An economic that pegs against social media crowd

What had happen to Secondlife and their Linden Exchange? Or World of Warcraft and their trading platform or rather their virtual trading outpost?

Social gaming had create an economy that surround social media. Company like Zynga had reportedly had been very successfull with Farmville that had been played by more than 70 million people around the world.

We have wrote about Paypal economic and some of their alternative but when Wikileaks had been boycott by both the hard and virtual economic platform, I think we should relook again this question. PC World think the whole events may lead to a new virtual currency.

Virtual currency already have their way into real hard currency in the form of debit card, direct payment to bank account and other means.  It’s suffice to say you can actually make a living by becoming a virtual currency exchanger. If Paypal command a major shares of digital market, it’s not impossible that there will be a virtual currency that dominate social media world.

Mass-Transparency bring more harm than good.

Recently Malaysian Police used Facebook to trace the mastermind of kidnapping case of a housewife and elsewhere a teenager found out the hard way not to be so trusting about new found friends in the Facebook. In addition, “Criminal Minds” address the serious flaw of social media. In one of their episode, “The Internet Is Forever“, The BAU travels to Idaho to profile a serial killer who is using the internet to find his victims on social networking sites in Boise.

In the wake of mass-transparency outrage created by Wikileaks (although some believe it the biggest hype of 2010), even business started to look at privacy issue differently. IT landscape and tools will forever change and so does social media. Now everyone can be the next Julian Assange because everyone can be the next whistle blower.

Company no longer have a sole control of their employee’s personal brand worse but also lost control on their own brand.  Perhaps it’s time to look into social-reciprocation, a company give something to the crowd in return for the crowd-branding. We’ll should expect more social application that closely link and intertwine with all our social media account.  My advise approach with cautions.

Well, in a few more hours we will leave 2010, in the next chapter, we’ll talk about what to look for in 2011.

Related articles

• Social Media – what’s the worst that can happen? (measuresconsulting.wordpress.com)
• Top 10 News-Makers of 2010! (trak.in)
• Ten Stories That Shaped 2010 | LISNews: (lisnews.org)
• From Germany to Russia: A Model for Facebook’s Worldwide Growth (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook in China: Connecting with 1bn people – and the censors (guardian.co.uk)
• Is Social Media Making Us Less Human? ” crowdSPRING Blog (crowdspring.com)
• 3 Steps You Can Take Today To Prevent Social Media Overload (newcommbiz.com)