or people of a certain age, like me, first encounters with things like Facebook can be utterly terrifying.
Despite all the hype about social networking, the urge to share every thought or experience with the rest of humanity just didn't appeal.
After all, what's the point? Why should anyone care what I think about anything (this email included!), let alone why I would want to listen to other people's self important rants? But of course, as the Vogons say, resistance is useless.
This is how it goes. First of all one of your more enlightened friends will suggest you check 'that Facebook thing out' because 'everyone's on it' and 'you won't believe who I've seen on there'. Of course you ignore them because all that stuff is for the kids.
But then a couple of workmates get in on the action and start showing you their profiles and the profiles of other people around the company that they are now online 'friends' with.
Curiosity gets the better of you. You search for the Facebook profiles of a couple of mates, look at the hundreds of friends they've amassed, panic at how popular they are and how sad your life now is in comparison.
Next thing you know, you have a profile and suddenly you're writing on the walls of people you haven't seen for 15 years (and, bizarrely, people you saw down the pub just last night).
Before long, changing your Facebook status message becomes the single most important thing you do before 10am every day.
It's entirely understandable then that it's not enough for some people to access things like Facebook for a few hours a day (on company time). They need 24/7 access and that means mobile.
Juniper says revenues from mobile social networking, dating and personal content delivery services will increase from $572 million in 2007 to more than $5.7 billion in 2012, with social networking accounting for 50 per cent of that total.
M:Metrics, meanwhile, reckons there are already 12.3 million mobile social networkers in the US and Europe - in the US, Facebook’s mobile audience is about two million and in the UK about 307,000.
So the migration is already well underway. It will be interesting to see which social networks eventually triumph on mobile - will in be the giants of the Internet or will it be the specialists like Gofresh, Jumbuck, Peperoni or AirG?
Either way I know it's not for me though. All that mobile content stuff's for the kids...
