Friday, June 10, 2011

Technology Turns Social

Social: Adjective, [attributive] relating to society or its organization, … suited to living in communities, living together in groups … with complex communication. Origin: … from Latin socialis 'allied'…[Oxford Dictionary].

As technologists, we should not forget that the consumers of technology are primarily humans – “social” animals.

Therefore, changes in social behavior often influence the direction of technology. And, when technology enables the natural tendencies and aspirations of society, a “tipping point” is quickly reached, propelling massive adoption. This happened with Facebook when it made “social networking” truly social with photo tagging, and is seemingly happening with Groupon, as proved by its sky-high valuation in a takeover bid.

Hence, to predict the technologies that are bubbling-up to the top now and will shape this decade, let us look at trends in society and social behavior, and see where that leads us…

People today are “on the move”, but need to maintain their complex communications. Therefore, “mobility technologies” are definitely going to be a growth area in the coming years.

Society has come to expect “infrastructure as a service”. Though recently popularized by cloud and virtualization vendors, such services are not new. Telecom services have been available for some time now as prepaid packages that can be “topped-up” as needed, and wireless broadband has replaced the modem and router at home. Virtualization and cloud computing will become equally prevalent.

Realizing the importance of social behavior, technology is trying to understand and predict it, like a dog chasing its tail! As a result analytics, business intelligence and behavior/sentiment analysis are thriving. These will be areas to watch out for in the years ahead.

“Social” traits are now evident even in new computing paradigms. “Elastic computing”, seamlessly distributing large workloads across a community of allied resources is the theme for technologies like MapReduce, Hadoop/Hive, Terracota/BigMemory, Azul Systems’ Zing JVM, and similar projects. This trend will keep gaining momentum in 2011. Growing volumes of “relationship” data in the “social networks” has given rise to “graph databases” and the related concept - “NoSQL”. These are still very early-stage, but will rapidly mature in the next couple of years.

Am I the only one thinking "social"? Of course not. The Gartner 2011 top10 strategic technology list includes – Cloud computing, Mobile Applications and Tablets, Social Communication/Collaboration, Video, Next-Generation Analytics, Social Analytics, Context-aware Computing, Storage-Class Memory, Ubiquitous Computing and Fabric-based Infrastructures. As you can clearly see, most of these technologies follow the themes of social usage patterns, mobility, infrastructure as a service and “computing-infrastructure communities”.

So, if you are a Technologist, better start thinking like a Sociologist!