Will the face of 2011 be social media?

I suppose we all know that the answer to that question will in some way be 'yes.'

Social media platforms are now more widely used than their railway equivalents - and you don't have to hang around waiting for a dirty, one-way journey, packed in with strangers. Social media offers conversations with friends wherever and whenever you want to hold them.

For many in the west, India is synonymous with the image of packed trains on a largely unreliable service. Interesting, then, that WARC News is reporting this morning on the popularity of social networks in India too. According to WATConsult, the social media agency, total penetration is some 60% which, when you consider the vast population of friends and strangers in that country, is pretty impressive.

In an article in yesterday's Guardian it was reported that almost half of the global online population visited Facebook at some point in 2009. Already the largest UK display advertising publisher, showing 24.4bn ad impressions to about 30 million web users, Facebook is also the world's biggest photo site. An average of 2.7 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every 20 minutes. In an online comment on this article it is suggested that over 750 million photos were uploaded in the first 48 hours of 2011 - or over a million photos every four minutes on average!

So yes, one way or another, social media will be the face of 2011