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Social media has been transforming the internet and the way we communicate over the past few years. In the past, communication was limited between people far away, and the internet was reserved mostly for finding information. Finding a job has transformed right along with the onset of social media. Gone are the days when the best way to find a job was through the newspaper alone.

It’s not all fun and games in social media today. The original social media platform, MySpace, is hemorrhaging up to 10,000,000 visitors per month at the moment and News Corp, who bought the site 5 years ago for $580,000,000 are currently looking for a buyer.

The site, which in many ways taught its supersedents how not to do social media dropped web traffic from 73,000,000 to 63,000,000 between January and February this year. In a report released by comScore it was found that the social entertainment site cum social media platform cum social entertainment site again was experiencing about half the traffic it was a year ago.

Who does not, at some point or other in life, get nostalgic about their childhood friendships – that neighborhood kid they played together with in the garden, the kids from school who were regulars for play dates or even the friends they hung around with in college? Looking for these friends and reconnecting would have been impossible if not for social networking websites, like Orkut or Facebook, which is without doubt the most popular social networking websites today.

Social networks are undeniably a double edged sword, both from an employer and employee perspective. Businesses are increasingly seeing the need to establish some kind of social network presence. Whether or not they know anything beyond the fact they ‘need’ social media is open for debate, but the fact remains: in most businesses, social media usage is welcomed with open arms. With a growing population of smart-phone users, and the increasing availability of iPhone-style apps on cheaper phones and tariffs, social media has become a near-default method of communication for many. Why text or call from your phone when you can freely send a multi-recipient message, perhaps even to more than one platform or just to the world in general?

And, so, the online media wars continue.  .  .  . Just as “Video Killed the Radio Star” in the ‘80s, so “the Internet Killed Print Media” in the 00’s. Or, so it seems. Yet media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has unveiled his vision of an apps-only news source which he thinks will challenge this trend and cause readers to turn to their ‘readers’ for their daily dose of news, rather than to online news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News.