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What will be the Future of Social Media?

Social media, in the traditional sense, are interactive media platforms which enhance the inspiration and exchange of information, including but not limited to user-generated content, official releases and entertaining content, through online communities and networks. Differ from traditional media which is under monologic transmissive channels, social media offers more interactive channels to allows creators and users to improve and receive more well-defined source, at higher frequency and accuracy,  through dialogic transmissive channels.

Before Web2.0, users have no say on the internet that they can only passively receive information from the page while without the right to share their own or respond to others. However, with the emergence of the Web2.0 and social media, in earlier stage like Yahoo and Facebook, to currently on-heat Youtube and BeReal, consumers are considered as the focal point with well-designed adaption to users’ habits and psychology through big data systems.

In this wiki, the scope of discussion of social media will be confined to Instagram to have a more thorough insights into the current features,  possible room for improvement and its impact.

Customizable Privacy Settings
On Instagram, freedom in customizing users’ own privacy preferences is provided to users, to control the degrees of access to users’  personal page through prohibiting others commenting, checking users’  activity status,being mentioned  in a story and tagged users in a post, etc. It also allows users to keep a copy of account information. These functions, to a large extent, can reduce the possibility of a privacy crisis. With higher emphasis on privacy, it can be predicted that Instagram will embed more privacy preference into the app setting to maintain in-track with the social trend. While it would be a difficult task as it may compromise advertisers’ interest as with more information from the users, they can tailor-make their products and advertisement to attract more profile

Push Notifications
Users of social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook frequently receive real-time notifications. Social media companies use push notifications to keep users engaged and remind them to return to their social media accounts. It is important and useful to receive some notifications, but it is also possible to receive unnecessary notifications. Facebook, for instance, reminds users of their friends' birthdays, anniversaries, and festivals. These real-time notifications elevate the using time of the social media. Data findings show that Twitter's direct open rates improved by more than 50 percent on average after adopting rich push notifications with thumbnails and expandable images.

Customizable Privacy Settings
It is obviously observed that the system is constantly recording users’ data in automation to feed users with most related and most preferred information in real time. “The study found that Instagram collects 79 percent of its users' personal data and shares it with third parties, including search history, location, contacts and financial info. Any information you agree to be gathered by an app when signing up can be analyzed for their benefit and even shared.”  quoted from a news report. Often users find out that similar content will pop out continuously if they search for a certain keyword. This automatic data-collection which is stored in Instagram’s Server is at risk for data leakage and improper commercial usage.

Without privacy settings and users agreement on data collection, this aspect is required for a modification. It is suggested that Instagram should allow users to decide the scope of data collection to balance between privacy and service. With more data, service can be finer but not without users permission. Second suggestion is that Instagram should reduce the percentage of sharing to third party as users should have authorized Instagram to collect data to provide a better service but not to the others.

Feasibility of the Development
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Socio-technical Impact of Future Development
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External links section
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