Lee Dryburgh who year after year has been organising the Emerging Communications Conference has alerted the members of Facebook group to the talk on the future of mobile technology posted by Mark Rolston of Frog Design. The talk at the 2009 eComms conference (San Francisco, 3-5 March) is now up, and more will come in future. However, this one talk already touches on several questions that we have seen ourselves debating in the recent past. One of these is privacy, and with the news that the UK’s government is seriously considering to tap into emails, phone calls and Facebook profiles, the issue can hardly be any more problematic.

In the words of Mark (who says he is not on Facebook), people are unconsciously waiting for the digital Pearl Harbor to happen in order to begin to reconsider (revisit, rethink, etc) the notion of privacy. He envisages something truly heinous occuring to the vast amounts of personal information already available on the Internet, for individuals, organisations and governmental bodies to start working together on finding the ways to establish the guidelines for sharing of personal data.

Mark’s vision of the evolution of social networking also seemingly goes against the currently suggested model of powerusers. Facebook is now for Social Networking what AOL used to be for the Internet… but we know where AOL is now. For Mark, the future is in elaborating on the set of standards rather than building up another master control scheme.

Similarly, in terms of technical developments, Social Networking future is not in the one-stop devices, but rather in revamping the power of email communications and “dirtying up” email services with opportunities for social interaction. As for the business potential behind it all, to quote Mark, “a lot of people are talking, but not a lot is being said”. This kind of confirms my feeling that the talk about Twitter business model has reached its saturation point (would it not, at 67 thousand Google results??)

The points above come from the Q&A session. The talk itself focuses entirely on how the evolution of mobile technologies has been making us rethink our communication flow, as well as the opportunities to (re)invent the world. Oddly, the boundary between physical and virtual is blurring more and more, while diverse and sundry devices become placeholders rather than facilitators of communication. This culminates in the absurd situation when a guy can think of any possible virtual means to get attention of his would-be girlfriend, totally forgetting to knock on the door.

All in all, this reminded me of this blog post about the ‘social’ media monster by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, in which the audience heartily debated the problem Twitter presents for SEO, and linkbuilding in particular.  Twitter, like many other Social Media tools, is great as a part of a concerted marketing effort, but alone it is that very public chit-chatting service, as some tabloid newspapers recently wanted us to think. What this monster – Internet and mobile technologies combined – achieves is that it lets us assess our ability to remain ourselves, instead of jumping on bandwagon each and every time.