Enabling Technologies and Business Infrastructures for Next Generation Social Media: Big Data, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and Virtual Reality

The last years we faced a tremendous development of social media powered by innovative technologies related to web services, web 2.0 and social networks. Nowadays we are entering in to the next digitally enriched generation of social media and enabled by thrilling, currently under extensive development technologies, like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Virtual/Augmented Reality and Internet of Things. To our understanding the new generation of social media and the integrated business models that will support them are within a converging area where social features and ubiquitous technologies are met. Social elements, related to behavior, self-esteem, attachment and other psychological dimensions of personality will be transparently integrated to a number of technologies. Thus for the next years we have to wait for a number of new applications and systems, all targeted in a meta-existence level where the characteristics of human identity will be mixed with various digital identity elements. This basic trend and direction in the Social Media research in the next decade will boost the transparency of technologies and will stimulate an extremely different Web than the one we are exploiting together. The key dimension of the Social Media sphere will be the dependent social identification of humans by a number of technologies.