Super list of 50 social media links

"Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer. Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."

The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.

Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.

Everyone is doing it Wrong answer. Look, do not get social media confused with social networks such as Facebook or social news sites such as Digg. Social media is essentially a platform for communication. Whatever the technology, or means, communication is the outcome. Every company can benefit from communicating a valuable message. Although many companies dabble in social media, a large percentage are simple wasting their time. You must know what you want to achieve from social media to form a good strategy to achieve it.

Pervasive The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.- Mark Weiser

1. The Web As Platform Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

Confusing Aggregation With Importation With so many different platforms to aggregate, noise levels are surging.

Top Questions A representative from Rensselaer told us that "right now we have about 25 questions running the gamut from internet privacy to how the web can solve the global hunger crisis." He mentioned that "there are some really good questions that go beyond the obvious - for example, a question about crossing language barriers as Internet access expands in the developing world." The most popular topic "by far" is the semantic web, but the equal most popular question overall is about net neutrality. Here are the top questions over the last 30 days, at time of writing: Semantic Web a dream? Is net neutrality essential for democracy? Can you imagine the future of the world (wide Web) without the Semantic Web? What would such a world (wide Web) look like? Muttilingual Internet--Fracturing or Blossoming? What controls should be in place on the Web, if any? How do we make sense of the proliferation of data from the ever growing number of User's social activity feeds? Can the web help us solve the world hunger problem? How can we make ourselves less vulnerable to "web failure"?