What exactly constitutes social media varies by country, and through time, especially now that connectivity increasingly involves mobile devices rather than desktop and laptop computers.

MySpace was one of the front-runners of SoMe until the upstart Facebook (FB) overtook it in 2008. Since then, FB has grown to be the global giant of social media, with more than half a billion users globally, but it by no means has the social media space to itself.

The micro-blogging platform Twitter shot to prominence in late 2008, and by early 2010 it had more than 100 million registered users and was generating an average of 55 million tweets a day. What’s particularly significant about the Twitter statistics is that 37 percent of its users use their mobile phone to tweet. According to digital marketing intelligence company comScore, social networking is by far the fastest-growing mobile activity, with 20 percent of mobile users now accessing social networking sites via their phones.

Now Twitter, too, is being eclipsed in the headlines. Newer social media services based on geolocation allow users to register their physical location digitally, in cyberspace, and connect up physically. The numbers of people using such services are still relatively small, but several fast-growing businesses are vying for the position of hottest geolocation service.

The location-based services are still small players, but their rapid growth is attracting a lot of attention, suggesting they may be the next step in SoMe. Their popularity stems from their having been designed to bridge the gap between the virtual online world and the face-to-face offline world.They offer yet another way of staying connected with members of one’s circle 24/7.