While it’s been awhile since I wrote directly about social media, it’s time to get back in the fray. With it only being a week into 2009, here are some of my predictions of what’s to come this year.
1. Social Media aggregators and filtering.
I’ve seen a major expansion in these services Digsby, FriendFeed, Flock and so many more have all started to crop up. Social media is spiraling to so many sites and it is really hard to keep up with it all. These aggregators will help us manage all of our social profiles. I think that soon we are going to see Google looking to get into the aggregation game. I know I personally use a lot of Google features, as do most of the people I associate with. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find Google add a lot of these features to Igoogle.
2. Expect a lot more video.
There are a lot of bloggers who are implementing video instead of traditional blogging. Video technology has become so cheap almost anyone can access it. ( I just picked up the Mino Flip HD). Outside of hand held video cameras, there has been an explosive proliferation on the mobile video market. I recently signed up for Qik, and I see a good number of other people following suit. There are a lot of screencasting / live streaming options available too. There are tons of companies looking at viral videos (which I would approach with extreme caution). I am also going to go out on a limb here and say that Youtube is going to start losing business to other niche video sites.
3. A push towards mobile devices.
Since the smart phone market is growing, we are seeing complex devices hitting the average consumer. Almost all of these devices have Internet and GPS capabilities, and we are going to see a lot more location centric social media. Most of the mainstream social media sites have mobile applications. Since we are seeing more designers and web engineers get into the mobile game, I again wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see them take advantage of location-aware mobile applications that will let people connect based on the places they frequent. Just take a look at BrightKite , a service I just signed up for.
4. Digital identity control.
Since a lot of people starting to “brand” themselves, we see them use the same name across many different services. I use Openid myself with this domain. I also use a lot of Google’s services. It makes sense for them to become a manager for my online identity. Facebook is getting into the digital identity control game with Facebook Connect. Yahoo is offering their own services as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more services using a digital identity control system.
5. Microblogging changing news coverage.
While Twitter is exploding in popularity, it’s not the only microblogging service. In November, when the attacks in Mumbai occurred, we saw explosive use of twitter being used for updates on what was happening in the city. While this information was not always accurate, it was timely. Information was flying as fast as the mobile networks and Internet could handle it. CNN has begun to integrate twitter into its coverage casts with traditional media fielding questions via twitter. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find more media network tailoring their style to something similar to Current.tv.
I’m no Nostradamus but I feel pretty confident in these predictions for the upcoming year. I’m going to explore some of these predictions in detail in some upcoming posts so stay tuned for those on the horizon.
Who knows what 2009 will bring in terms of social media. As always I would love for you to add your thoughts or predictions on what you think we will see in the upcoming year.
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