Continued Expansion of Social Media

Social media are software applications, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, that allow users to post their own content to the web. Over the past 10 years, the use of social media has exploded. Across the web, billions of users leverage social-media tools to post content to the web. Such content can range from vacation photos, to recipes, to political opinions. In the future, we should expect the use of social media to continue to grow, driven by underlying meta data (data about the data) that includes geolocation and time information as well as machine learning that helps users customize the content they want to see.