The human habit

It is a commonplace to say that humans are social animals. It is altogether another thing to leverage this fact of human nature to devise new services and technologies to support it. Indeed, the past 10 years or so have made it clear that there is both a need for, and many new business opportunities made possible by, technologically enabled social communications that had not been expected. These have generated and will continue to generate traffic for fixed and wireless infrastructures.

Social connections may be distinguished from person-to-person communications by the fact that they typically entail the broadcasting of messages or, for example, the multiple viewing of single messages on the home page of an individual's social network. Websites such as YouTube, MySpace and Twitter are incredibly popular because they satisfy a basic desire to stay in touch and to know what friends, colleagues and family are up to. It is about being part of a group, not about individual relationships. But satisfying this desire has also created new distinctions in types of social connection and this in turn has cultivated new needs. It is very likely that these will continue to evolve over the next decade or so in ways that will have consequences for technology.

Several forms of digitally enabled social connection can be demarcated. One relates to the sustaining and invigorating of existing social relationships. Here websites like Facebook come to mind.