As a part of an event I have com­ing up, the organ­is­ers asked me to do a litte future spec­u­la­tion on the direc­tion the cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal aspects of social net­work­ing are tak­ing. Here’s what I put together for them.

Since late 2008, Aus­tralia and NZ have seen a sig­nif­i­cant spike in aware­ness in the gen­eral pub­lic and busi­ness of social net­works. A lot of those peo­ple are only now get­ting their heads around the poten­tial value these tools can offer to their lives and organisations.

Growth of social net­work use, espe­cially net­works like Twit­ter, will see an explo­sion of users (we’re already see­ing it), and an explo­sion of use­ful­ness when peo­ple and par­tic­u­larly gov­ern­ments and politi­cians realise it can be used as a near-​​instant clear­ing­house and coor­di­na­tion point for things like pol­icy for­ma­tion, ser­vice deliv­ery and can­vass­ing of opin­ions. It’s per­haps even pos­si­ble we’ll see it being used for things like coor­di­na­tion of dis­as­ter man­age­ment information.

Of course, we’ll con­tinue to see the shouty mar­keters and the get rich quick types pro­lif­er­ate, but they’ll get fil­tered out by the com­mu­nity of users as they prove to add no value to the con­ver­sa­tion. On Twit­ter, as with any social net­work in the phys­i­cal or online world, it’s about the value of the net­work, not the num­ber of peo­ple you’re con­nected to.

In a world where we’re busier all the time and our cir­cles con­tinue to expand well beyond local, the cul­tural shift appar­ent in soci­ety to a point where peo­ple want bet­ter con­nect­ed­ness (and I’m not just talk­ing about online) in a real, human way, means the impor­tance of social net­works will con­tinue to grow. It’s only a mat­ter of time before their use becomes nor­mal rather than some­thing of a curios­ity to large parts of the world.

As one of just 15 Aus­tralians (of 2000 atten­dees) at TED this year, I was able to wit­ness first hand a group of peo­ple for whom this shift has already taken place. Wildly dis­parate — doc­tors, musi­cians, artist, sci­en­tists, phil­an­thropists, jour­nal­ists and more — this group of rel­a­tively early adopters are empow­ered and empow­er­ing thanks to the cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal shift they’ve made. There’s noth­ing they believe can’t and won’t get done with enough will­ing­ness and they use the power of their con­nect­ed­ness to make amaz­ing things happen.