Twitter has just inaugurated its new offices in the heart of Paris, near the Opéra... not far from Google's old offices - and a stone's throw from the new ones. Politicians are flocking to these events (with Valls taking over from Sarkozy), and one might well wonder about the significance of these ceremonies, where the operators of the future use the codes of the past: statesmen in suits and premises in former mansions renovated at great expense.
This perhaps avoids the question of their future, a question that is so iconoclastic... but perhaps not so absurd, even for Google!
For Twitter, this is still a topical issue, as many are questioning its future as an independent player: its growth is stagnating and the return of founder Jack Dorsey to the helm has not reversed the trend; in short, its survival would depend on it being backed by a larger, wealthier group.
The boundaries are moving fast in the small world of the Web, and more particularly the social Web: the GAFAs - Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon - seem set to be replaced by the TUNAs - Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb - whose financial valuations exceed those of the old economy players (Tesla is 'worth' as much as Renault and Airbnb as much as Accor); not forgetting the world's largest social networking business, China's Alibaba.
New technologies have killed off giants like Kodak, and some of the first high-tech giants are beginning to disappear in their turn, like Yahoo! And in the graveyard of dead social media, we find many ephemeral glories like Second Life - which in 2007 was considered by all to be THE social media of the future; or MySpace - at least in its 'Rupert Murdoch' version, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars. And who would still bet on Elo (a network so secretive that it has never taken off) or Meerkat - sunk as soon as it was launched by Twitter and its Periscope?
It's hard to bet on the future of Twitter, where almost 4 out of 10 users are under 25; or even on Snapchat, which is massively appealing to the very young and has snubbed Facebook's offers to maintain its independence: tomorrow's Web will be less what the operators imagine than what its users make of it.
So it's hard to answer the question: what will tomorrow's social networks be like?
At the end of the 20th century, what experts could have foreseen their advent - apart from the brilliant researchers of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but without really envisaging their scope?
Secondly, because the impetus comes not only from companies and the technologies they develop, but also - and above all - from the citizens who adopt them or massively reject the new tools at their disposal: who would have believed, a few years ago, in a site where you could post photos that were automatically deleted in a few seconds?
(by François Laurent, Blogger at MarketingIsDead.net)
