I was sitting in the rocking chair during the Labor Day holiday contemplating the future for my young daughters … no, not the rocking chair in the grandpa kind of way, but the rocking chair as the only thing that is helping soothe little Lily at the moment!
Reviewing the conversation during the past week with Sam Harrelson and others regarding the significance of Identi.ca and other microblogging formats, I couldn’t help but wonder about the very long term. I can see how federated communication platforms will be applied in the near term but I started wondering about the scenario when my daughters are teenagers and will not want good ole’ Dad subscribing to their posts.
There are numerous accounts in the media demonstrating that among the current 100 million users of Facebook, friending between parents and children takes place, for good or bad depending on your point of view. Compartmentalizing through the Privacy Controls is probably the best approach to keeping some things away from helicopter parents on Facebook.
But, that’s not really the point that I was pondering. I’m more interested in the whole closed universe versus open platforms. If Twitter survives as the dominant micro-blogging platform and it remains THE place to be .. how are fathers schooled in Social Media practices and daughters Twittering their friends about the best parties supposed to exist on the same platform?
It’s just not going to happen .. somewhere there will be an exodus of one these groups and my guess is that it’s the younger, more fluid group.
What happens if the parent is responsible for marketing a product with a demographic target audience that overlaps with his children, and he is compelled to use the same social networking tools for business as his daughters use for communicating? Do both generations simply bite the bullet and accept that it’s just the new world of communications and all messages are open for public consumption?
I think we may end up with a privacy setting built into micro-blogging platforms. Dad will be able to target the open social networks that are most likely to contain key influencers and evangelists for his product, while his daughters develop a seperate network with strict peer developed access (invitation only, etc.), without fear of an embarassing message popping up in front of Dad.
It’s a different dimension considering I would normally just add both of their names into my Track client to see messages across all open Laconica platforms, but disabling the track function from a closed, private network will allow it to flourish among a particular group hoping for exclusivity.
This can also be applied to the Enterprise community as well.
What do you think? Will we have closed communities concurrent with the open development underway? How will micro-blogging look 10-15 years from now?
