Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

As we become more and more connected to our business associates and our friends, we are going to become increasingly dependent on social media, that ubiquitous blend of networking and marketing that runs through almost everything we do on line. We keep up with our friends and our clients on social media sites, and trade information with an increasing blend of business and social connections. This is interpersonal networking at the limits of the capabilities of the internet. Just ask Twitter.

From students walking in groups, but all talking on their cell-phones, to sites like Plurk, Twitter, and Facebook, we are already enmeshed in a web of mixed business and personal communications throughout most of our waking days and nights. We explore the world on StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Digg. We are entertained and informed via YouTube, iTunes, and the blogosphere.

Over the last very few years, a majority of our citizens have been turned into netizens, with daily routines that are connected almost as much to their virtual lives as they are to their brick-and-mortar lives. Some of us (and I certainly include myself) have gone well over the dividing line. We shop online. We get our news on line. We often have more “friends” on line than we have in the increasingly-misnamed “real world.”

As the speed and portability of our computing improves, this dependence on the virtual is going to increase. When our brains are connected to other brains by the global network, there is going to be very little difference between our virtual and the non-virtual lives, save the ever-important factor of actual physical contact. Meanwhile, day by day, we are being trained to increasingly consider the virtual world as closer and closer to the real world.

Tomorrow: How social media is changing our real lives.