What is the Next Paradigm Shift in Software Development for Social Media

By: Safa Alshannag

In this post I want to talk about the paradigm shift in developing social media websites. Traditionally (circa 2005), developing a social media website would involve a range of web development features. Very early versions of social media platforms such as MySpace started with text and image-based html and incorporated simple web dev features such as presenting personal profile pages, inserting ads, and maintaining a reliable server that can keep with user traffic.  Next generations included more advanced web dev features such as flash-based content and server-side processing using PHP and MySql to handle user data and ad content.

With the rise of Javascript and CSS, social media platforms started to deliver rich content and more interactive websites. Incorporating e-commerce features and advanced ad features into social media platforms and vice versa accelerated the adoption of advanced security features and rich content delivery.

Today with mobile web, social media platforms have become the driver for most of web development. Almost every e-commerce website links to a bunch of social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, …etc.). Social media has become the web point of entry for over 2 thirds of web surfers. Social media drives people to the web and by that it drives the web. Today, almost all software development technologies are being leveraged in web development for social media and the question is: what is the next shift in this paradigm?

I believe the next shift will be driven by the value of data provided by social media. With advent of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its application and role in social media, the value of data has never been more valuable. That’s because the main ingredient to developing artificial intelligence applications is data. In the next generation – if not in the current one already-  of social media platforms, AI classifiers will be running on web servers and client sides to take the user experience to the next level. However, this requires collecting data for developing such classifier and that’s where innovation is needed. As the need of data is on the rise so does the concern of user privacy, companies like Facebook, Google or LinkedIn have to define new satisfying rules for the consumption of user data in their AI engines or the rules will be defined for them. I think being proactive about devising such rules and creating new web technologies that can benefit from user data without violating the user’s privacy is in the benefit of companies and gives them the ability to work with flexibility towards that.