Jonathan talked sustainability of social media in Macau

Jonathan talked sustainability of social media in Macau

At the inaugural meeting of Macau Internet Research Association on June 23, 2011, Jonathan Zhu gave an opening speech on a topic of his favorite – the sustainability of social media. He cited the classic theory of division of labor, anecdotal evidence from user traffic and stock price, plus the findings from the tracking study the Web Mining Lab has carried out on the sustainability of blogging behavior on Sina Blogs, to speculate about what the social media in general, social networking sites in particular, may look like in 5 years. He challenged a recent prediction by The Economist that Facebook will last for 100 years, as IBM has done in the past 100 years.

Among the audience at the meeting were government regulators, IT industry professionals, and university researchers from Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China.