Author’s Note: I wrote this piece two years before I started this blog, Social Media in Change. I stumbled upon it in my files and decided to post it here – I’ve been fascinated by social media since its infancy, and it’s very interesting to compare perceptions two years ago with today’s current climate.
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I spent the last couple hours perusing the web and attempting to catch up on emerging and already established social media, an industry that is growing impossibly fast in number of users, but is increasingly having difficulties with their revenue streams.

Social media has allowed anyone and everyone to be a publisher and a distributor of content – free speech at its finest – you can say whatever you want, and have access to people all across the world who will lend a willing ear.

As such, does this deregulation of the published content on the internet compel individuals to be their own regulators of their behavior? Or will social media and networking self destruct due to its appallingly free speech nature? A Mashable article piqued my interest in this topic: Can we venture to say that social media will improve our behavior in the private and public spheres because our personal lives are so readily available on the web?

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From what I’ve experienced, social media and social networking sites is all free market capitalist. It’s not “may the best social media site win” because there are infinitely possible add-on software and applications that can be created – so there are many winners in this game.

The barrier of entry is almost null because the possibilities of the web and social media are endless. Or are they? At what point are the possibilities of social media connections maxed out? Will there be a point where our lives are so fast-paced and media-connected that our human brain capacity cannot keep up? At what point is the building up of so many social media sites, software, and applications with poor revenue-generating models going to come crashing down because no one is earning any money? How many more venture capitalists are there going to be to finance all of this with no return?

With all the polls, predictions, and talk surrounding the fate of Twitter, we’ll see how long the microblogging site lasts, whether it will lose its popular boom in a year or two, who buys Twitter, if any, and how much it will sell for – WSJ says, not under a billion. (Facebook currently valued at $10 billion, with new investment from Digital Sky Technologies)

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In addition, social networking sites seem to be run surprisingly democratically. For example, Facebook is now well established and dominating the social networking world, and as such has garnered a lot of users with plenty of opinions. Whether it be protesting a new user interface, critiquing a line in the Terms of Use, or generating support for a new application or feature, FB groups are a sort of “virtual petition” to the corporation and I’m sure they at least notice, because social media and networking sites are primarily dependent on their users. I think Facebook has learned its lesson and now lets its users know when they are implementing a new change. (Although I think there should be a “revert to old Facebook” option…the current UI still confuses me sometimes).

The business models of the burgeoning social media and networking sector are so primarily focused on generating massive growth in users, yet can small firms handle such rapid burgeoning growth, and be able to generate profit?