Making observations at the Davis Library

I have been spending a lot of time lately doing work (mostly internship search related work) at the Davis Library. Davis is on main campus right by the Pit. This is exam week for the entire university and the place is swarming with undergrads. I am amazed at how many times I look at an undergrad’s laptop screen and see either Facebook or AIM.

 

This reminds me of a conversation I had in college about ten years ago with a bunch of guys from my dorm. The conversation turned to new technologies and someone said that “investors” (I am sure by that term he really meant venture capitalists, although none of us were aware of that term yet) were beginning to look at the usage habits of college students to determine what the next “big” technology was going to be.

 

A good example is AIM. When I was in college, I had never heard of it. Sometime around fall of the year I graduated, I received my first IM from a college buddy of mine who went on to graduate school. I was so unfamiliar with it that I thought my AOL account had been hacked once again. During the next four years, AIM gained popularity mostly among college students with each year’s graduating class leaving its campuses only to continue using AIM to communicate. We are now at a point where almost everyone thirty or under has an AIM (or equivalent) account.

 

Could Facebook be next? It is already the fifth most heavily trafficked site. I first signed up in November but didn’t start to really use it until around February when I discovered that a ton of my classmates are on it. Facebook now allows networks to be created based on office email domains. I believe that just as AIM redefined the way people, starting with college students, communicate in the late 90s, Facebook is the mid 00’s (have we agreed on a name for this decade yet?) equivalent of this “killer app.”

 

I had blogged last week about the joys of academia. This is something else that’s unique about being on a college campus, you get to observe trends and fads and where technology is taking us.