The Guardian’s (amazing) Mercedes Bunz released the following article via RSS but then promptly removed it from the archive. I’m sure it’ll reappear shortly after a bit of further editing, but I just wanted to pip them to the post!

After social networks what’s next?

Digital media might be the only field, where the future is as much part of the present as for fortunetellers. So “What is the next big thing?” is a key question everybody working with the internet is asking constantly. However, as we live with social networks for quite some time now, the question what comes after social platforms is not so far-fetched anymore.

Luckily, some experts just provided us with answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the 9th year, and was chaired by the very lively and assertive Rector of Exeter College, Frances Cairncross.

The first expert to confront us with an answer was Peter Thiel, an American entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and made early stage investment to Facebook and LinkedIn. Learning from the past, he reminded us to evaluate first in which stage we are with social networks. “With digital technology there is a tendency to underestimate when things are getting mature, but to understand the financial and technological situation it is really important.”, he explained.

“If you look back from today, it becomes clear that in 2002 even experts missed that Google had already become the main search engine. If people would have understood back at that time that there was no chance anymore to outrun Google, some investments would have been different. But back at these days we didn’t discuss Google like this.”

Learning from this mistake he asked the audience: “Where in the history of social network are we? Are we at an early stage, and most of the companies won’t be around in a few years time? Or are we in a late stage, when companies like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter are really mature and will be in business to stay?”

As his business is investing in future technology asking that wasn’t enough for a Peter Thiel. He proceed to confront the audience and his colleagues with the idea, that not only the developments of social networks, but the internet itself has come to an end: “Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?”

“See, we went from the development of telecommunication to the internet and from the internet to social networking. Maybe there is no innovation left anymore, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction. Maybe we have to go back to space and science fiction novels.”

Being the CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone was quite sure that for him that wasn’t the case. After having said to reporters that he was not thinking about selling the company but would rather go to the stock market if necessary earlier that day, he started to relax the atmosphere joking about that he feels like being on a Seinfeld panel asking “Social network, what’s the deal?”.

Then he shuffled himself out of the responsibility to answer that question with stating that Twitter is no social network, anyway. “Twitter never asked anyone to have a permanent relationship among each other. Indeed, we even changed the question we used to asked on Twitter ‘What are you doing?’ last week in ‘What is happening?” because everybody was ignoring it anyway.”

“I refer to Twitter as an information network rather then a social network. And here I believe in the trend of openness. Using an open technology, creating an open platform, and being more transparent that is where we are heading.”

Biz Stone believes that technology has a political impact that shouldn’t be underestimated. Referring to Twitter’s involvement in the protests of the Iran election he said: “On a large scale, the open exchange of information can even lead to positive global impact. If people are more informed they are more engaged, and if they are more engaged they are more empathic. They are global citizens, not just a citizen of a nation.”

Ram Shriram, founding board member of Google and one of the search giants first investors pointed to a different direction. “Combining social and mobile, there is a new wave of oppportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle. And this time this didn’t start in the US, but in Asia and Europe from where it is going to the US.”, he said.

“In China and India people always used their mobile as their PC as that was the way they accessed data. We face powerful new waves of publishing with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the social sits in the middle of this. There is a creation and production of information. There will be new distribution and consumption patterns which will impact society. This might even make newspapers even more irrelevant.”

Then he made a number of predictions: “Facebook will replace email for a new generation. The chat is moving to a multimedia format. Gaming will move from devices directly to the internet. And Apple has a big future because of its strong mobile focus.”

Otherwise the coming up mobile business opportunities will be taken by small young companies as it is rather easy and cheap to build these applications which will fail fast or succeed quickly as they win users or fail. Ram Shriram believes as well, that advertisement will not be so important: “Users tend to pay on the mobile internet for premium services.”

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who graduated from Stanford University and Oxford with a master’s degree in philosophy, finally disagreed directly with Peter Thiel’s thesis, that social networks are the end for the internet. “I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social networks into their life.”, he said and reminded the audience that bankers were the first one’s to use mobile phones and now they are important in everyone’s life.

“I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. You might think, who wants to consume all this useless information, but with some information it is like with ice cream. It is not nutritious, but people still eat it. And to understand what will go on, you will have to switch that to business models.”

For the Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr applications using the live stream data will become much more important. “Today you have everyone generating data. I think these massive amounts of data are perfect for new applications. There will be a lot of new applications come out of it. Obvious ones, like whom you should meet professionally, and some we don’t even thing about. There will be interesting mash ups liked LinkedIn and Twitter.”

Dr. Kate Blackmon, University of Oxford Lecturer finally put this in a nutshell in saying that the future was not be about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.

So are social media over? Yes, and no. It is rather likely, that there are enough social media platforms out there not to leave too much of a niche anymore; but making use of the stream of information that pours into them just started.