Social Phenomena

I was wondering how people get to think in herds and about the recall value that people have. I wanted to do some research on the social phenomena that affect our life and how they can be used for the benefit of business enterprises.

The main factor that technology leverages on and becomes a mass phenomena is the sticky factor in the technology. If a new technology is a few years ahead of its time people have a barrier to accept it and the technology even if it is very useful will die a slow death.

In the recent months I want to compare three things viz.. The phenomena of Google Wave and that of Face book and Twitter. I do acknowledge that G-wave is still at its starting phase and it needs its time to peak. It is not a nice idea to compare all the three, but for the sake of understanding three different platforms at three different phases the three are the epitome.

The sticky factor in facebook is greater than that of twitter and that of G-wave. The major contributing factor for it is the number of your peers on both the networks and the ease of use.

The phenomena of micro blogging and twitter is sweeping the world and celebrities are latching on to it to post their "STATUS" on the move, the coming of celebrities has put the twitter phenomena on to the growth path and more over the multi usage of Twitter for small business and for marketing has increased its viability.

The Facebook brigade took India by storm. Till then all the youngsters were happy with Orkut and its scraps and communities. Facebook just swept Orkut out of the numero uno position in India and occupied it with in 6 months time.Huh! Thats pretty fast.

The growth in the Facebook is more linked with the amazing array of games it has, like Mafia wars and farm ville. These games were an integral part in the growth of Facebook phenomena in India, where people formed a community to have an Indian flag for farm ville to designate their nationality.

The Google wave is an extremely useful tool, and it will bring the new wave of revolution in web 2.0 in the way work is done and also in the way that people are going to interact. But it is still at its initial stage overcoming the hiccups to stand on its own feet. But it has the backing of Google and it will grow.

The peaking of a social networking tool starts when people join it in numbers and people only join when they see a certain amount of numbers. This in itself is a chicken and eggs situation and for every social networking platform to succeed it should over come this predicament. To overcome this it needs to have some extraneous help like what happened with Twitter and Facebook. Once the growth starts then it grows exponentially before hitting a plateau.

P.S:- This entire article was written in 30 minutes of time with out any back ground work and if some of the facts are mis represented, please do correct me.