What’s the next next big thing in social media?

First social media was the next big thing. And we’ve got Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the crowd, with large and fast growing numbers of users.

Then linking together your social media activity across different sites was the next big thing. And we’ve got repeated options to post content to more than one place, send notifications from one service to another and make at least partial use of your friends network from one service on another.

Then real time search was the next big thing. And we’ve got new services trying to muscle in on Google whilst Google speeds up its own indexing times.

So now that with varying degrees of success and usage we’ve got all three, what’s the next next big thing?

Whilst (see point two above) it’s becoming increasingly easy for me to spread my activities across different services, it’s hard for me to follow anyone else across that range of services. In many ways, this is what FriendFeed offers. It’s built up a base of very loyal users but not taken off into the mainstream.

I don’t believe though that is a reflection of a weakness in the underlying idea. There are other services which offer variations on this, such as BackType, which I’ve been recently experimenting with. Backtype collates your comments across different blogs into one set of records, which can then be used to feed tweets to let people know what you’ve been saying or an RSS feed which people can follow (or you can integrate with your own RSS output), and so on.

Perhaps FriendFeed’s takeover by Facebook will propel its services into the big time. Or someone like BackType will take off. But by whichever route, I think there’s a fair chance that this sort of integration will be the next big thing.

In the meantime, if you comment regularly across different sites, do give BackType a try. I really like its range of features, though the speed with which it picks up comments on different sites varies somewhat.