With Web 2.0 being virtually everything to everyone, there are two areas which the new Internet has aplenty - customisation and personalisation. Virtually every country, company, organisation, community, family, and person seems to have a different approach to communicating on today's Internet, and current technologies certainly allow for almost any taste in customising or personalising.

Armed with these tools, each web surfer will use them to best reflect his or her own personal environment, and the best example of this potent creativity is social media. Social media is generally seen as any user generated content created for the web.  Social media allows for as many varied views on the Web as there are individuals. 
Social media started as weblogs (or blogs), a form of self-expression often seen as an online journal.  Today, blogs have evolved to become more than just digital diaries - through their evolution; blogs have enabled connectivity among individuals, even across borders. Blogs are now considered so powerful that they are used in any situation where connecting people is vital:  as an advertisement for any product or service (buyer to seller), a group's organisational site (member to member), project central (service provider to client), or a pundit's soapbox (author to reader). As a result, blogs have become a most influential communications medium for just about anyone.

But with so much access to technology, especially in the West, there comes an excess of what is insignificant and trivial.  This is where countries like the US could take a hard look at social media usage from other, very different geographies for insights and direction - such as India.

I have had the good fortune of traveling to India quite a few times and its environment amazes me with every visit.  Being a fast growing economic power, India faces an interesting juncture:  while many parts of the country still need development and infrastructure, India has built centers of global excellence in Information technology, R&D, and commerce. This juxtaposition has fostered a unique and continually adapting society, especially online.
In India, the US and European countries would probably see three aspects that could very well be the lessons of how social media can and should be used.

The first aspect is India's emphasis on and use of social media for goodwill and nobler purposes - much of this benevolent activity toward a greater good is driven by necessity and the strong tech environment.  A recent example of this was seen post India's natural disasters of 2004-05 - the tsunami and flooding in Mumbai. While the region was grappling with the aftermath, Indians began leveraging social media to build communities of outreach and the resulting blogs were some of the most referenced websites overall in India.

Western countries have so many other resources and traditional lines of help that perhaps blogs or social media are seen simply as a complement to what is already there. Nevertheless, India's blogs show that the content of Social Media should make a favorable difference by being better in touch with vital, societal concerns and not just communicating information that is meant to entertain.

A second characteristic is the power and depth of India's online networks and communities - the nature of relationships forged via Indian blogs seems to be more meaningful and rich.  In the US, due to the growing amount of Social Media content, Americans have developed an almost Attention Deficit Disorder approach to Social Media - surfers visit many sites a day to read updates and post comments before moving quickly to the next blogs.  In this scenario, true relationships are rare, especially with an increasing Privacy/Personal Security paranoia, and real people connections will likely be more difficult to come by in the future. 

As an example, the New York Times highlighted a community site, babajob.com, where members/employers can help job-seekers, many of whom do not even own a computer.  With the babajob case study, it is truly astonishing that technology has transcended the divide between the offline and online worlds.  Part of the credit has to go to technological advances, but a majority of it goes to the Indian society who sought deeper connections with people via Social Media.

Finally, the third feature of India may be the growing trend of social media coming from non-Personal Computers (PCs).  For the most part, blogging and Social Media has been the domain of the PC.  In India however, the PC is certainly not as accessible as in the US and from both countries' economic outlooks, it is doubtful that the PCs will ever be as pervasive as they are in America.  Thus, Indians have moved to the forefront of Mobile Blogging.  Mobile Blogging (or Moblogging) is the concept of publishing user generated content directly from a mobile device such as a cell phone. 

In India today, people use their camera phones as a primary device of Social Media in sharing images, videos, and commentary.  In this trend, blogging may reach a much higher level of access for the masses. Experts say that Indian moblog tools are not easy-to-use for the general population, but operators and service providers are trying to improve them quickly because they see moblogging as a strong, upcoming trend. 

These three characteristics of India's Social Media may give rise to a different Internet future from the one predicted by the current Western environments, and that is very welcome.  In showing how content, people networks, and access technology have shaped its citizens' Social Media, India advances not only its own state, but also may help countries everywhere in attaining the best use of the Web.  

(The writer is Managing Partner and Co-Founder, EmPower Research.)