While it was People Power on EDSA that catapulted former President Cory Aquino to the highest office in 1986, it was Twitter Power when she died last August 1, 2009. “Tita Cory is dead L,” headlined one online friend in her Plurk. For the most part, it was through microblogging media like Twitter, Plurk and Facebook thatwe I learned of an event that would once again change the history of this country.

For those of us enjoying internet connection at home, our routine is to check our favourite social networking sites first and then browsing the online version of the newspaper to verify the hottest news of the day.

This is what living is like in the age of Web 2.0. The circumstances surrounding Tita Cory’s rise to power in 1986 and her death in 2009 served to illustrate the great technological revolution that has occurred since. In the 1980s, the Filipino people showed the world that they can overthrow a dictator and in 2009, we showed how we can galvanize ourselves once more to go to the streets, aided by tweets, Facebook status updates, blogs, and video livestreaming, among others.

And what makes this all exciting? We no longer just listen to our favourite broadcasters or even browse our favourite blogs to become part of public opinion. We’ve become empowered to formulate the opinion ourselves, and it’s fine (if not interesting) even to announce mundane bits about our lives to others. An example is my friend Amy who considers it the highlight of her day to do something which she can post to her Facebook later. The reactions of her friends are gems which determine her social persona.How more focused can you get?

All these developments are affirmed in the comprehensive Wave.4 ‘Power to the People” social media report released by Universal McCann last July. The report, considered the biggest social media study to date, surveyed 22, 729 active internet users from November 2008 to March 2008. It covered 38 countries, including the Philippines, and went as far as the Czech Republic.

The verdict: “social networks are becoming the dominant platform for content creation and content sharing,” the report states.

The heavy and varied usage of social networks has proven that these sites are no fad. Not only have 96% of social networkers visited a friends’ social network page but nearly two-thirds of all active internet users have spent time managing their own profile.”

Profile management means that majority (76% of users) have uploaded photos and 33% have uploaded videos, “compared to 16.9% last time around,” the report stated.

The prevailing dominance of social networks is bad news to blogging actually, because rather than posting from their Wordpress or Blogger publishing platforms, for instance, internet users prefer to direct the conversation now to their social networking page and update their profiles from there.

According to the report, there is growing convergence in the sense that the social networks enable users to do everything from their site itself. Hence, we can post photos on our Facebook album while blog on the Notes application and get addicted to FarmTown – all from there!

The other key findings of the report worth noting:

Social media platforms are becoming more multi-media. The number of bloggers and social network users who have uploaded photos, videos, music and widgets has continued to rise.