The Next Big Thing

An article by Buzz Internet Staff    No Comments

Everyone is always talking about and looking for the ‘next big thing’ in every aspect of their life, and we’d be lying if we claimed we were any different here at Buzz Internet. It’s part of what makes us human and part of what makes life fun. Seriously, who doesn’t get excited by the thrill of trying to guess whether a new technology is going to be the next Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram… or whether it will go the opposite way and become the next MySpace, Betamax or Laser-disc?

Pinterest and Instagram have probably been the two most notable success stories in this field as of late, with the former quickly becoming the fastest growing social media platform in history and the latter having been proven to be worthy of a billion dollar price tag for Facebook to acquire it.

What do these two exploding ideas have in common? A couple of things, and when we look at them, we get the feeling that there is another company out there getting ready to explode–but we’ll get to that later.

Simplicity: They are both incredibly simple ideas, that anyone could have created, but they didn’t. This should teach us all to never be afraid to get your ideas out there; you never know where the next big thing is going to come from.

Visual: Pinterest, if you don’t know is a social platform for people to display pictures and screenshots of their favorite websites and products and share them with their friends. One of the first things you’ll notice when looking at someone’s Pinterest page is that there is very little in the way of writing, it’s all about grouping photos together into categories and letting them do the talking. Instagram is very similar is this aspect but relies on the photos that you actually take and choose to share with the world.

Now, as was mentioned earlier, we at Buzz believe that we can use these two key factors to make an educated guess on what could be coming up as the ‘next big thing’ in social media and it’s called Signal.

Signal is already being described as the Instagram of citizen journalism and we think they’re probably not too far off, although it’s only in private beta testing stage at this point and not expected to be released in the iPhone’s app store for a few months. Signal’s creator, Lebanese entrepreneur Mark Malkoun, says that he created it to fill the need for a true social media news app. He goes on to point out that Twitter won’t directly alert you to breaking news, due to the fact that you have to be following someone who happens to be there and able to tweet about it while it’s happening.

Signal will solve these problems by allowing people to take pictures, add a short caption of up to 60 characters and upload them through the app. But where the real genius of the app comes in is how the algorithm handles these photos after they’ve been uploaded, if multiple people are reporting the same story, it will merge the photos and captions together to start combining them into single news story.

What do you think? Will Signal explode like Pinterest and Instagram have, or are we way off base here? What do you think the next big thing will be? We always want to hear your views.