Martin Butler Research

The social bubble is starting to inflate quite nicely. Everything in IT will soon be prefixed with ‘social’, and legions of ‘social’ start-ups will enter the market. There is no telling how big this bubble will get and when it will burst. All we can say is that the deflation will be sudden and dramatic.

The phoenix that will rise from the ashes of the burst bubble will be networks deployed by large corporations to interface with customers, with other corporations and with employees. Just as the end of the dot com era saw the rise of serious exploitation of the Internet by large organisations, so the same will happen after the social bubble has burst.

Expect to see some whacky behaviour and even more whacky predictions about the paradigm shifting nature of the social explosion. During the dot com bubble there were serious suggestions that people would stop shopping in real shops and that we would order our dishes over the Internet before we went to a restaurant. Social computing will reach an extreme; at which point people will yearn for the water cooler and just having a straightforward chat.