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Now the role of mobile phones is expanding to support forming and maintaining “community”—both geographic based communities and communities based on diverse cultural interests—creating new ways for people to connect and communicate.

Today anyone working in the converging worlds of communications, media, and technology knows that communities are perhaps the most influential factor and value-added service in the emerging market,

they will expect applications to be aware of users’ context—both their physical environment as well as their virtual environment: their location, the tasks in which they are engaged, the information they are browsing, the people with whom they are interacting, and the history of each.

A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects

evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.

social networking sites have played a significant role in making people become more isolated

Every day, USAToday.com, the third most popular news site on the web, gets more than 20,000 comments on its stories. Gannett — America's largest news publisher, with USA Today and 81 other dailies, has made "community conversation" a centerpiece of its new strategy

Many stations use three or four of the user-generated stories a week on air.

Number two, the economics of user-generated content are a potential godsend for media companies, big and small. Media can compare the costs of well-salaried editors, producers and reporters to those of "cheap-to-free content," eagerly offered by some pretty good writers. Now draw a line between the headcount reduction in journalism and the rise of user-generated content. It's not a straight line, of course, lots of zigs, zags and caveats, but the trendline is unmistakable.

Only 5% of the information that is created is “structured”, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers. The rest are things like photos and phone calls which are less easily retrievable and usable. But this is changing as content on the web is increasingly “tagged”, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.

However, the amount of reading people do, previously in decline because of television, has almost tripled since 1980, thanks to all that text on the internet. In the past information consumption was largely passive, leaving aside the telephone. Today half of all bytes are received interactively, according to the UCSD

computer-mediated communication use and research are proliferating rapidly, findings offer contrasting images regarding the interpersonal character of this technology.

Across the internet economy, companies are compiling masses of data on people, their activities, their likes and dislikes, their relationships with others and even where they are at any particular moment—and keeping mum.

“They are uncomfortable bringing so much attention to this because it is at the heart of their competitive advantage,” says Tim O’Reilly, a technology insider and publisher. “Data are the coin of the realm. They have a big lead over other companies that do not ‘get’ this.”

Amazon and Netflix, a site that offers films for hire, use a statistical technique called collaborative filtering to make recommendations to users based on what other users like. The technique they came up with has produced millions of dollars of additional sales. Nearly two-thirds of the film selections by Netflix’s customer come from the referrals made by computer. EBay, which at first sight looks like nothing more than a neutral platform for commercial exchanges, makes myriad adjustments based on information culled from listing activity, bidding behaviour, pricing trends, search terms and the length of time users look at a page. Every product category is treated as a micro-economy that is actively managed. Lots of searches but few sales for an expensive item may signal unmet demand, so eBay will find a partner to offer sellers insurance to increase listings. The company that gets the most out of its data is Google. Creating new economic value from unthinkably large amounts of information is its lifeblood. That helps explain why, on inspection, the market capitalisation of the 11-year-old firm, of around $170 billion, is not so outlandish. Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.