In Five Years, Social Network Connections Will Be Dial Tone

“In five years, everybody will always be connected to each other, instead of the web,” says Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO. It's the sort of thing you might expect a CEO of a fast-growing social network to say.

How right does Pincus have to be to create a new dynamic for services built around what we used to call "dial tone?" Probably not completely, or even mostly right.

Most people communicate mostly with a relatively small number of people, in their roles as individuals, family members, friends or members of various social groups. Even for most people in their roles as workers, the number of people one communicates with is relatively small.

So what is a social network, especially one with "presence" features? A way of creating the equivalent of "dial tone, the ability to initiate a communication.

Pincus says he often thinks of today’s social companies as providing the equivalent of “dial tone." It's an interesting comparison.

You might think non-real-time messages are not "communications" in the same way dial tone was. But even voice communications began to change with the advent of voice mail. Where once only synchronous communications were possible (a calling party reaches a called party), with voice mail non-synchronous communications began to be possible.

Since the advent of voice mail, other non-synchronous modes also have become important, including email, text and instant messaging, which can be non-synchronous, synchronous or nearly-synchronous.

In fact, blog posts have been said to be a form of non-synchronous communication very similar to Christmas letters, newsletters or traditional media, where point-to-multipoint messages are sent.

In that sense, social connections and networks do provide features and value quite similar to dial tone.

In Five Years, Connections Will Be To Each Other, Not The Web; We’ll Be Dial Tones