The topic of the most recent Social Media Expedition Breakfast was the mainstreaming of social media. So what can we expect as social media continues to grow and change, while making its way into the mainstream?

End users’ consumption and behavior are changing, and it’s that which is really driving the constant mutation in the way industries view their online presences.

With RSS feeds, viral videos, Hulu and YouTube, users are seeing their entertainment options brought to them. No longer do we have to separate entertainment from information – and we’re not talking about infotainment here, we’re talking about how, on Twitter, you can follow the Commercial Appeal and CNN, while also following characters from your favorite TV shows.

One day soon, we may not even need to set our fingers to our keyboards in order to participate. Voice-to-text (and text-to-voice) technologies are making leaps and bounds towards being able to accurately transcribe what we’re saying. Facial recognition is beginning to reach a point where our computers could conceivably recognize our moods and transmit that across our social networks, keeping us more up-to-date than ever before.

"Future Robot 4 by Salim" by Salimfadhley on Flickr.

This mass of information can already be overwhelming. Which is why we’re excited to see developments in things like the semantic web, tagging, and filtering, all as a way of helping us manage the information overload we’re already seeing.

If you want to find something specific, a Google search can point you in the right direction, but too often, end users are left to do most of the heavy lifting in finding what they’re looking for. These filters will make sure your results stay relevant.

All of this requires a sea change in our behavior, too. We will be finding ourselves as end users in charge of policing our own communities, enforcing those community standards, as the volume increases to the point where the official moderators can only deal with the worst cases.

And just as users can express displeasure with other users, they may also find themselves in a position to mobilize their political displeasure – for just as social media makes it simple to organize a community for conversation about political topics, it also makes it easy for users to mobilize other users to take actions such as boycotts and protests. We’ve already seen this happen – the online group Anonymous has organized worldwide protests against groups like the church of Scientology.

These very same grievances – and the threat of backlash to the point of boycott – have encouraged businesses to take their customer support online. By monitoring the conversations around their brand, businesses like Comcast can respond to a complaint before it even escalates into a full-fledged grievance.

What will be most interesting, however, is seeing how web services make the money required to keep themselves operational. There is a growing school of thought that ad revenue will start to shrink, then plummet as businesses realize that they aren’t getting the return on the ad dollars that they once did. Advertising might never go away completely, but it will almost certainly shrink and become impractical as a main source of funding.

It’s almost certain, too, that new networks will sprout and grow as time goes on, and there will always be those people who become addicted and those who will tire and burn out. Sensationalist news reports will always inflate the perception of how many social media burnouts and addicts there are, but it doesn’t replace the fact that most users use social media not to replace face-to-face relationships, but rather to enhance them.

"Science Minister Lord Drayson shakes hands with Bert" by DIUSGOVUK on Flickr.

We’re seeing examples of this enhancement (which is better termed "localization") largely in food – there are numerous slow food and local food websites and networks out there, and they’re an excellent example of people using social media to find people and sources of food in their area where they can go out and get what they need.

It’s this same localization that powers the concept of the long tail. While more people go out and support local restaurants, bookstores, record shops, it’s clear that the late-20th century corporate model of mergers and acquisitions in the name of finding a larger audience isn’t necessary for profit or sustainability – in fact, if the last year has taught us anything, it’s probably that the old model is bad for sustainability.

We live in a new world, where smaller businesses and networks can find their small bands of users and quickly respond and adapt to their needs. The providers of the current batch of web-based tools understand this – rather than provide a step-by-step user manual, they leave it open-ended. They give their APIs to developers. What they’re saying is "hey, here’s a tool. Use it to do what you want to do." Tools like Twitter are infinitely adaptable.

And adaptability is the name of the game. But the adaptations that need to happen now are too sudden and too huge to be called ‘evolution’ anymore. What is needed, of businesses, networks, and end users, is mutation. Sudden, backflip-like adaptations which will expand our knowledge of what is even possible, to the point that the internet in five years may appear completely unrecognizable to us today.

Tags | future, mainstream, Social Media, tweeple, Twitter