Rethinking social networking in 2008

2007-12-12

Spooky - I was just collating some thought about social networking then Anne Zelenka posts half of my thought process. The power of the meme or proof of a higher power? Most likely just coincidence but anyway, it prompted me to throw down my thoughts before they get blogged into the past. So, here's my uncorroborated opinions and unfounded predictions for 2008:

- There will be consolidation of the social networking market. I just received a Xing email, and several Spock and Plaxo Pulse invites arrived today. The fight in the corporate space is with LinkedIn, and there can be only one. The same goes for personal social networking.

- Twitter will "vanish." I don't believe Twitter will exist in the same form a year from now. Most likely scenario: the company will be bought and integrated into a larger offering; alternatively it will become a messaging backbone for other services. Despite the highly vocal tweets of a few twitterati, most of the world don't work that way, or that fast.

- Facebook will lose to the next generation. Lets face it, Facebook was fun for a while, but is there really anything keeping us there? Facebook is all face and no heart, or soul - an integation platform to be written to. When something more interesting turns up, Facebook's fickle "customers" will walk.

- The real winners will be the leaves and the trunks. A few social networking sites will become the "trunks" - consolidation hubs that enable integration between sites. A few others will specialise in "leaves" - offering customer-specific tools that suit the needs of their subscribers. I expect Microsoft to be a leaf player, not a trunk player, for example. Google will be a trunk player.

That'll do - now taking beer-oriented bets for whether or not the above will prove true a year from now.