New media, but terrible reliability? Count me out.

I am fascinated by the growth of so-called "social networking". It never fails to amaze me, its an incredibly infectious activity. Services like Twitter and Facebook just keep on growing.

Why is this? Why has this infallible medium caught on?

I think its because people are finally realising that the more traditional mediums of TV (and to an extent radio) are fast running out of ideas. They are lacking originality, focus and ideas. Sure, you occasionally get brilliance like "Ashes to Ashes", if you live in the UK, or perhaps "Lost" in the US (if you think Lost is brilliant, that is, and not just a load of made-up b******t!

And this worries me a lot, because traditional mediums of communications, such as the landline telephone, TV and radio, are all very....well....reliable.

The internet isn't. Its incredibly unreliable. Yet it is increasingly being relied upon as a means of communication.

Very soon, the total number of available internet addresses in the entire world will be used up. The total available number is around 4 billion. This is likely to be a small catastrophe. And this is estimated to happen in 2011. Thats a year away.

If we want to use the internet as the mainstream way of communication, it needs to be 10 times better than it is at the moment. Because I would rather watch my widescreen TV for motor-racing, than a Justin.tv stream, and I'm sure many of you agree with me here.

The internet has huge potential. But we have barely scratched the surface. Reliability must be the next step forward, as we simply can't have it both ways. We must invest, to make it worthwhile. Put it this way: I would rather have a reliable source of rubbish-ness coming to me from the TV, than unreliable, fuzzy, poor quality, excellence.

There's something to chew on.