What 1 in 4 blogs is talking about today...I bet.

I bet you dollars to donuts (sorry - get that from my grandfather) that 1 in 4 blogs today mentions the Facebook crash.  So - of course, that's what I'm blogging about.  Why should I upset the cart.

A FB engineer briefly described the issue that caused the down time (see Mashable article here), but the vast majority of users will not understand it, they just care that they weren't able to water their Farmville crops or kill the latest Capos in Mafia Wars.

Facebook was founded in 2004 and the majority of Americans were unfamiliar with it until at least 2007.  That's six years since founding and only 3 years that most of us have been involved or even aware of it.  Yet today, for about four hours, the world stopped for MILLIONS of people as Facebook was unavailable for a few hours.  I mean really, it sounded like some people were ready to jump out of the 45th floor of the Empire State Building over this.

My question is - if a social community like Facebook (or Twitter to a lesser extent) can touch the lives of over 500,000,000 people (over half of which log on EVERY DAY)...(ok, I log on at least 10 times a day, but I work on the site...I promise it's work related) in that short of time, what on earth will the social media landscape look like in 10 years when my kids turn 13.  Will we still call it social media? 

Maybe it will become cognitive media.  Instead of smartphones, we have phonesmarts, implantable items that are surgically placed below your earlobe, one end attached behind your ear to the audio nerves, the other attached to your jawbone.  You speak and it transmits out, and it transmits impulses and messages straight into your nerves.  Sound to code converters will be able to translate speech into text or commands instantly and boom.  There you go, man made ESP.

I'm not going to go into the other aspects of our kids' lives that will be wholly different than what we experienced as a kid (let's just say if they only had 2, 4 and7 on TV, they would jump out the 45th floor of a building - shout out to Commander Tom BTW).  But I will say that the brief lapse in connectivity today had reminded me to take my kids outside, to keep the cell phones out of their hands for a while longer and to make sure they understand and appreciate human connection, face to face contact.