David Phillips certainly thinks so.
David has posted some interesting analysis using Alexa traffic statistics.
He looked at top 30 Alexa ranked UK sites and compared growth over the past three years between different types of site. His charts show very clearly the rapid rate of growth of social media during that time.
The trend to date has been the growth of stand-alone social media sites, such as Myspace and YouTube.
As Google’s purchase of YouTube shows, the next wave will be the coming together of traditional websites with social media websites, whether through direct acquisition or addition of social networking functionality to “web 1.0” sites.
In just a few years time we won’t be talking about social media as the shiny new thing – it’ll be everywhere on the web, integrated into the fabric of almost every website, and something else will be the next big thing that demands our attention.