Virtual communities in the social media landscape will be ever evolving to the point where it is inevitably integrated into the lives of everyone in the modern world. Looking at the massive growth of Facebook in the recent past shows how the world is ready to be globally connected with information and communication literally at their fingertips. Websites like Twitter have taken personal communication and made it so minimal to the point where you are restricted to a handful of words or short sentences to get your point out to the world. Initially skeptics thought this tactic would prove detrimental for Twitter but users proved that the short bursts of information is what they want to send and receive while on the go.
Looking at how today’s social media outlets have evolved and made updates to what they think their user base would find useful, or sometimes in Facebook’s case making changes that the majority of users do not want or like but are forced to use anyway, we can see where these virtual communities are heading. These social media communities are bound to be an amalgamation of each other and as time passes on they will take each others features and adopt, assimilate or appropriate them into one another and the world will move on communicating even faster.
Being the largest we can see a few trends for virtual communities being developed from Facebook as they added a streaming ticker of friend updates similar to a Twitter feed and recently bought Instagram for a small sum of one billion dollars which already had a built in community for photo sharing. Instagram now gets absorbed into Facebook and the two communities are linked and maybe one day the features are completely merged into one entity… “Facebooktwittstagram” ?
It is easy to see that the world’s traditional forms of communication are either evolving or dying as we become a global community with more means of easy communication. This newly forming global community isn’t going to get a cup of coffee with each other but could be on different sides of the planet doing completely different things while they are communicating. Social media has built new communities based on both small personal bursts of information and widespread communications that anyone in the world can see.
Being able to carry a five ounce device that can call your next door neighbor or document the movement of a military coup in a war torn country gives anyone on the planet the ability to spread their message to anyone who wants to listen. The ability to hear someones message from the other side of the globe the very instant that they post it is the amazing ability that these new virtual communities are giving to us.