11/02/2024 06:27:00 PM 
" Brands endeavoring to reach this influential audience as advertisers look to use the power of youth connectivity -- and the evolving definition of 'friend' -- to enable online propagation of their messages,"
Samantha Skey, SVP of strategic marketing for Alloy
At the same time, Ellen Lee at the San Francisco Chronicle have done a nice investigative piece on social media, finding that burnout and fatigue starting to emerge on the scene.
Some users are starting to feel that just keeping up with their online contacts is a chore and questioning the value of the time that they are spending online.
One quote from the article perfectly illustrates how people are starting to question the ridiculous extremes of social media.
"Caro kept an online cat diary for six months and hooked up her cats with about 50 friends each. "At that point, I thought, 'Who cares?' " she said. "Who cares if my cats have friends?"
Some observers look at teens and suggest that multi-tasking and online behavior are things that they grew up with an adapt to, coping and managing are things that they take in their stride.
Its important to consider that this is a movement that started as a cool way for bands to link to fans, exploded in 24 months to become "the way" to connect your friendship network for millions of people. It was fueled by a time by cool, but that halo of cool can't last forever and the movement is bound to be showing some growing pains.
In the end Alloy has a point, this thing is not going away overnight. Its become inextricably woven into the social connectivity of life and people are just trying to learn how to adapt.
Eventually, things will calm down and people will understand the importance of balancing their real social worlds with their online ones.
It appears you don't have Flash installed.