There's promise and peril in ubiquitous community.(Digital)(Column)

Advertising Age, May, 2008 by Rubel, Steve

Byline: Steve Rubel

Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: "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.''

She writes on her blog:

"I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social-network engagement....

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