This year I have 5 more predictions (and a bonus silly one). Leave a comment with your own predictions, to see if you can out-seer me!

• 1: Flipboard becomes the breakout news reading app of 2011. While Flipboard continued to expand, it was slow to move onto other platforms. The iPhone app didn't appear until December. 1/2 point.
• 2: eBooks will hit 20% market penetration by the end of 2011. The figure was 9.03% at the end of 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers. I got this one spot on, as AAP's most recent stats put the figure at 20.76%. 1 point.
• 3: Internet of Cars will be the surprise hit of the year. The Internet of Things continued to slowly build and car manufacturers like Ford iterated on their Internet functionality. While I'm tempted to claim Google's driverless car prototype as a win, the reality is that my bullish prediction didn't happen. 0 points.
• 4: Internet TV tips and gets huge consumer uptake. Hmmm, Google TV bombed and Apple TV remains a hobby... for now. Maybe in 2012 it will tip? I'll give myself 1/2 point for the success of TV-focused social apps.
• 5: A major pop music star will do something amazing with web technologies, that blows open the online music scene. While it didn't come from a major current pop star, like Lady Gaga or Kanye West, I believe that we saw a really amazing use of web technologies in Bjork's 2011 album, Biophilia. The album was an iOS app, with an interactive app for each song. OK, it didn't blow open the music scene. But it's a sign of the future. 1/2 point.

Result: 2.5/5. I'm a bit disappointed in that. But as I said at the start, it's all in good fun. So here I go again, with 5 more predictions!

2012 Predictions

1. This year's Best BigCo, Amazon.com, will launch a media-focused social network. Kind of like what MySpace used to be. It will be to a place for you to socialize around your reading, listening and viewing activities.

2. Twitter's usage will begin to wane, due to squeezing from Facebook and Google+. Maybe then Twitter will sell to Apple. Heck, predictions are no place for maybes. I predict Apple will buy Twitter!

3. Google's Chrome browser will make dramatic inroads into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, coming within 10-15% of it by the end of 2012. This will be due to mainstream people finally abandoning IE in droves. By the end of 2012, Chrome will have close to 30% of the market according to Net Applications (it currently has 17.6%) and IE will have just over 40% (it currently has 52.6%).

4. Facebook will have initial teething problems with its Timeline, but by end of 2012 it will be seen as a triumph - as millions of people begin to use Facebook over 2012 as their digital memory bank. I don't know if that's a brave (new world?) prediction or not, but right now there are a lot of skeptics about Timeline. So I'm firmly betting on Timeline being a big success for Facebook in 2012.

5. Music acts will start to truly tap into the power of the iTunes LP. Currently most iTunes LP releases are simply a PDF file with a bonus video if you're lucky. I predict that in 2012 many more bands and musicians will include multimedia in their digital albums and the braver ones will try to emulate Bjork and create stunning "app albums". This is a bit of a re-hash of my music prediction last year, but I really want to see widespread innovation in the digital album!

6. Bonus prediction: Bill Nguyen of Color fame will convince Silicon Valley VCs to part with $100 million, to fund an amazing new type of smart TV. It will have 4D, Internet telepathy and a revolutionary new sensing feature called Smell This®. RWW Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus will thoughtfully blog that it "may be the next Google." The TV will flop before the ink is dry on the last VC cheque. A few months later, the futuristic telly will be re-branded as a way to consume Facebook frictionless sharing "on the big screen."

[p.s. I love Bill's spirit, I really do. I hope he does try for another New New Thing in 2012!]

Those are my predictions, now let me know yours :)

I was right that the number of people blogging would continue to fall, but I was wrong that a digital news company was going to acquire a major legacy news organization. We were wrong about a few other things, too: Mobile payments didn't become mainstream, we didn't write a post called "Flickr: In Memoriam," and there was no severe privacy breach at a location-based service.

What's in store for 2012? Here are a few of our predictions (and more of our misses from last year). Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1. The Associated Press released its automated style checking software this week; 2012 will see the rise of some kind of rudimentary fact-checking equivalent. Serious bloggers and journalists will flock to it but fact checking won't help the fact that there posts will stile bee filed with typos.
2. The relative success of the New York Times' paywall (and others) will drive more experiments in getting people to pay for online content. Thanks to the Times' example, a lot newspapers and magazines will realize their print product doesn't have to be an albatross around their neck. As a result of package print/digital deals, newspaper circulation rates will slow their fall? No, that can't be right.
3. The legacy journalism world finally began to steal ideas - accelerators, venture capital funds - that the tech world has been doing for many years. That adoption will continue at a depressingly slow rate in 2012.
What other 2011 predictions did we get wrong?

• Cablegate will pale in comparison to the secret information about governments and corporations that is released by Wikileaks and similar organizations, which will continue to crop up around the world.
• Fantastic new tools for analyzing and displaying big data will appear.
• Readers' Choice for Time's Person of the Year: Anonymous
• Telephony will continue to become more about messaging. Email, collaboration tools, activity stream technologies and other apps will further integrate with telephony APIs.
4. Curation tools like Instapaper will still be something that everyone likes, very few people do well, and only a infinitesimal few ever make money on. The long-awaited brawl between publishers and those tools will never happen. The audience for that kind of curation, while growing, will remain small in comparison to the number of people visiting those stories on the publishers' sites.
5. We will still be stuck with insidious buzzwords like gamification, filter bubble, clicktivism, robust and, *shudder*, mocial.

John Paul Titlow, Writer

1. Apple will release an HDTV set, but it will be little more than a television running the Apple TV flavor of iOS. The user experience will be nice, but the device won't kill cable or turn the industry on its head just yet.
2. Joining Zite, one of the other popular news reading apps for the iPad will be bought by a big tech or media company. These apps still won't be profitable.
3. By the June 2012, Instagram's user base will have doubled from what it is today. Its Android app, once it's finally released, will be a big help.
4. By the summer, Google TV will not in fact be included on the majority of new TV sets.
5. The iPhone 5 will launch and include NFC technology for mobile payments, contactless data transfer and other innovative uses. Apple's integration will begin to wow mainstream consumers, but the tech still won't be widely adopted for a few more years.
6. Location-based social networks like Foursquare will continue grow in popularity, but will still be a far cry from reaching mainstream status by the end of 2012. The concept will be made more palatable among everyday consumers thanks to their continued exposure to check-ins on Facebook and better promotional deals and coupons at local businesses for Foursquare users.
7. We'll see a substantial increase in HTML5-fueled mobile Web apps as companies and publishers learn that it frees them from app store restrictions and is cheaper since it offers cross-platform support without having to code for every mobile OS individually. Still, the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace will also continue to grow.
8. At least three notable artists will pull their catalogs from Spotify, Rdio, MOG or all three over concerns about royalty payments.
9. Left in the dust in the mobile space and engaged in ongoing legal battles, Grooveshark will shut down or otherwise be rendered a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.
10. Your non-techie friends will finally start using Google+.

Dan Rowinski, Writer

1. Evernote will make a startlingly large acquisition that sets it up for mainstream success for years to come. Everyone will ask: how did Evernote get so much money?
2. Facebook's IPO will cause an exodus of top talent from the company that creates a new class of venture capitalist and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in much the same way as the "Google Millionaires" did a little less than a decade ago.
3. Google+ will become a truly international platform with more than150 million users. Most people will still decry it as useless.

4. A major corporation will get in trouble with privacy violations on a scale that most users cannot even fathom yet. Forget the Apple location tracking or whatever Facebook does or does not do. Carrier IQ could be the seed of this.
5. A U.S. President will be elected and the pundits will all say, "well, he/she had a really good social media campaign that carried them through the process."
6. Barack Obama will be reelected.
7. The city of Boston will have a couple high profile tech success stories and people will begin to say "Boston is back."
8. A major breakthrough in real artificial intelligence will be made at a university, large corporation or by the U.S. military.
9. The world will not end on Dec. 21, 2012. But, the spammers will make a fortune from the hysteria.
10. Either Hulu or Netflix will be acquired. One or the other, not both.

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Yahoo! finds a buyer. More Yahoo! properties are divested and sunset as a result.
2. Groupon sinks as quickly as it grew. Enthusiasm for daily deals comes back to earth.
3. Apple names the next iPhone something other than the iPhone 5.
4. Google+ becomes a legitimate contender for business collaboration, making Citrix sit up and take notice.
5. Flash survives 2012 on the desktop as a vehicle for video playback as Adobe builds and refines its tools for HTML5.

Joe Brockmeier, Writer

1. Microsoft will buy Netflix, and use Netflix as a driver for its Xbox and Windows 8 Tablets.
2. Twitter goes through at least one (more) major redesign, but keeps the character count at 140 as nature intended.
3. Yahoo will finally be sold to a surprise buyer.
4. Web series, like the short series Dr. Horrible and like "The Guild" will take off in a major way in 2012.

5. Reputation systems like Klout will flounder when people realize Klout "perks" are not worth playing the status anxiety game.
6. NFC payments, at least in North America, continue to be a niche offering. People are slow to adopt new payment options, and it will take years before NFC is widely accepted or used.
7. Mozilla launches its own, federated social network as an open and privacy friendly alternative to Facebook, Google+ and others.
8. Evernote introduces a file-sharing app or add-on that competes with Dropbox and Box.net.
9. Apple introduces its first actual television. The world recoils in horror at the price tag.
10. The "datapocalypse" caused by the shortage of hard drives following the Thailand floods impact cloud services. The price for online storage stays constant, or actually goes up.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

In the context of the 2011 social network battle of 2011, Facebook lost in the Identity category (you can't use pseudonyms on Facebook). In the Sharing category, however, Facebook came out as the obvious winner.

At the f8 developers' conference this past September, Facebook announced the launch of new Timeline profiles, frictionless sharing, Spotify integration and its vision for Facebook's Open Graph platform. A few months after f8, Facebook hired the engineers and developers behind Gowalla. (As a result, Gowalla will shut down.)

What Will Happen In 2012? In short: A lot. Facebook is aggressively hiring and is expected to go public in 2012 with a ridiculously high $100 billion valuation. I predict that frictionless sharing will continue to ramp up, especially in the areas of news and video-sharing. With the expert Gowalla engineers and designers onboard, I can see Facebook tweaking its Timeline so it's better at actually telling stories rather than just presenting people with a ton of visual information. The news feed will probably become more customizable and personalized, giving users some of the control they demand. I think Facebook will converge its UIs into a single platform, and everything will be optimized for mobile. In fact, mobile will be Facebook's number one focus. The long-rumored Facebook phone will finally come out, but it will bomb. By the end of 2012, I predict that Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark.

E-Commerce

In 2012, I predict that Groupon and LivingSocial will scale back on employees. Then it will increase the frequency and personalization of its deals. In fact, I predict that personalization and time-limited, location-based deals will be key for the future of daily deals.

Social networking-turned-flash sale sites like Fab.com will continue to grow.

The Facebook-EBay integration will be Facebook's last attempt at f-commerce before it finally gives up.

Digital customer loyalty programs like Belly will grow as merchants realize that they need a way to keep their customers coming back. In 2012, I predict that mobile commerce and couch commerce will explode.

Next page: What Will Happen To Location and Social Networks in 2012?

Location

Social Networks

I predict that Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will grow and thrive in 2012. Pinterest, a relative newcomer to the social network game (it actually bills itself as a social bookmarking site) will also keep expand. I also predict that we'll start seeing more visually focused, tablet-friendly user interfaces like Delicious'. People will increasingly access social networks from their mobile devices and tablets.

What do you think will happen in 2012? Do you agree or disagree with my predictions? Let me know in the comments below.

Chief among these changes and challenges, the use of mobile and social technology in two related movements: the Arab Spring and #occupy.

When it comes to the Arab Spring, the Internet was turned off in Egypt for only the second time in history for an entire country. Then the country's imperial president was turned out and joy erupted all over the Middle East and beyond.

That story went back and forth so many times there is simply not room to recount it all here. It currently rests teetering on a knife's edge between a fall back into tyranny and a rough drive out and up. Technology will feature in it, but exactly how and to what end is unknowable and, in my case, frankly unimaginable.

If it were a movie, it would be a thriller.

#occupy

When it came to the Occupy Movement, it has been said lately that it's gone global and that it's done so by traveling along the backbone of the Internet. It might be more accurate to say that Occupy is the Western iteration of the Arab Spring, adapted to "first world" nations' worries - like the money-fueled corruption of the political process, the bankrupting of the people by their financial institution, the use of religious and cultural rhetoric to wage war...

You know. Western stuff?

If it were a movie, it would be kitchen-sink realism.

Africa

If there were a single thing I feel confident in predicting, it would be the increasing importance of Africa. Although I had been interested in, and had written about, Africa for several years, my trip there this year, the opportunity to see the vibrant Afro Nerd Superstar entrepreneurial culture with my own eyes, opened me up viscerally to the energy and opportunities on the continent.

And mine were not the only eyes from which the scales fell. Others included Wired and Forbes.

As I wrote in the article that concluded my Technotransect series:

"Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward, according to a recent study. Anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to swell the ranks of the "if I had invested $100 in Apple in 1981 I'd be a billionaire" crowd. I fear that the government itself, as well as the large tech companies so avid for the continent's growing purchasing power, may be among them. But that won't matter to the Afro Nerd Superstars. They've got things to do."

If it were a movie, it might just be a Horatio Alger story.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we've been posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Groupon will buy Foursquare, ushering in a new era of location-based commerce.

2: Kevin Rose will leave Digg, or sell it for a bargain basement price, then leave.

3: As many witnessed (by accident), the Facebook Pages product will be compeltely re-vamped and will allow brands to have a Facebook voice outside of their Page.

4: QR codes will finally score big with a mainstream industry: wine.

5: Online curation services like Storify will be more widely adopted by mainstream journalists and news organizations, providing a more social, contextual layer to reporting.

6: This time next year, we won't be talking about the glorious resurrection of Delicious.

7: Many Facebook users will continue complaining about privacy while never actually having visited their privacy settings.

8: A late 2011 RWW post will be titled "Flickr: In Memoriam"

9: The most overused word in the tech blogosphere will be: hacktivism.

10: Readers' Choice for Time's Person of the Year: Anonymous

Abraham Hyatt, Production Editor

1: A major digital news organization will acquire a once-major legacy news organization. Much handwringing will occur.

2: Africa and Asia (which have the largest share of worldwide mobile Web usage) are the mobile industry's 600 lb. gorilla. It's clear that those markets will end up playing a significant role in how the world consumes the mobile Web. Watch for more big names investing in developers in Africa.

3: News organizations will try to meet the growing demand for mobile content by spending a lot of money creating mobile apps. The apps will be mirrors of their websites and they'll be confused - like they were when they did the same thing with print and the Web a decade ago - when no one pays attention to them.

4: As micro-content creation - tweets, status updates, micro-blogging - becomes the norm for online communication, the number of people blogging - or creating any kind of long-form content - will continue to decrease. However, the number of people actually consuming and interacting with that kind of content will remain the same. A win for content creators, but will it increase the monetary value of what they create? Doubt it.

5: The availability of big data - massive sources of raw data - will increase. Some fantastic new tools for analyzing and displaying that data will appear. Very few people will use them but the people who do will blow our minds.

6: Curation will become an art form. Storify-like apps will proliferate.

7: The number of people who go online every day but visit fewer than 10 different sites a week will increase. Call it the Facebook bubble. As we predicted last year, for many people "Facebook" and "Internet" are becoming synonymous. They're a small minority, but they're growing - and they're not very happy when they have to leave that bubble.

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise and ReadWriteCloud

1: Virtualization will turn data centers into extended cloud environments. The term "private cloud" will become meaningless.

2: Developing apps from APIs will continue to become easier. The ability to explore an API will become more sophisticated and the automation to create the apps will open development to more people.

3: Big data, analytics and data visualization will force major changes in how user interfaces are developed.

4: Mobile virtualization will start to see adoption. The enterprise will see the value in creating distinct environment for apps and data on a mobile device. It will also mean that people will not have to carry two or more mobile devices.

5: The web content management space will extend as marketers move almost entirely online. Analytics, personalization and social technologies will integrate with CMS environments.

6: Telephony will continue to become more about messaging. Email, collaboration tools, activity stream technologies and other apps will further integrate with telephony APIs.

7: The network will flatten. Networking will move to center stage in importance as virtualization becomes standard practice in data centers and the cloud.

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1: A severe privacy breach strikes a location-based service, thrusting the issue of privacy on these networks back into the mainstream.

2: Verizon launches a CDMA iPhone 4 in the US; rumors of a LTE version erupt shortly afterward. Verizon's network sees strain it hasn't yet seen before.

3: Foursquare is going to start getting more into the acquisition game, cementing themselves as a long-term player and looking less and less likely as a takeover target.

4: News Corp. will spin off or shutter MySpace this year.

5: IE 9's release will bring with it a renaissance for Web designers: HTML5 and CSS3 will begin to hit mainstream in a very large way starting in 2011.

John Paul Titlow, ReadWriteBiz

1: Location-based apps like Foursquare will continue to slowly inch toward mainstream adoption. Local businesses will drive monetization and emerging technologies like geofencing will improve the user experience.

2: Tablet user adoption explodes, driven by Apple's iPad, which will see new competitors pop up left and right. Websites evolve accordingly, using HTML5 over Flash and simplified designs optimized for the tablet browsing experience. Tablet prices will drop down close to $200 by year's end.

3: The U.S. will finally get either Spotify or a Verizon iPhone. Maybe. Just one of them? Please? Oh, forget it...

4: Cablegate will pale in comparison to the secret information about governments and corporations that is released by Wikileaks and similar organizations, which will continue to crop up around the world.

5: By the end of the year, mobile payments will begin to approach mainstream status, as people increasingly whip out their phones instead of their wallets to pay for things.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: There will be major opportunities and innovations around big data - storage, processing, analytics. "Data-driven" will be the new buzzword. "Data scientist" will be the new hot job. So in the spirit of the film The Graduate, I want to say one word to you. Just one word. "Statistics."

3: Peer-to-peer services will expand, in part as a response to #2. P2P technologies and networks will improve, and new services will spring up that privilege trusted relationships.

4: "Not dead yet," squeaks the Web. Thank you, HTML5.

5: Investor dollars will flow into the education technology sector, and there will be lots of acquisition activity in ed-tech as many large media, publishing, and tech companies stake their claim in the space. But there will also be several ed-tech scandals (test-score related) and failures (yes, Kno).

6: Openly-licensed content - open education resources, open source, open data - will thrive, as more people question outmoded intellectual property laws. Nonetheless, there'll still be patent and copyright infringement lawsuits aplenty.

7: Mobile payments will explode, and our phones will increasingly become our wallets. The growth will not lie solely with apps and in-app purchases on smartphones, but will come from carrier billing arrangements on all types of mobile phones.

8: Tablets will be the hot device of 2011 - a lot of new buyers, a lot of new manufacturers. Most of the latter will suck, and the iPad will continue to dominate sales (and app sales) until late in the year when a decent Android tablet is released. Despite over a year to prepare, it will fail to have a better name than "iPad."

9: Maker Fairs will flourish. Hobbyists will build mind-blowingly cool projects. And inspired by the likes of Kinect, Scratch, and LegoMindstorms, legions of kids will be inspired to become builders and hackers.

10: My mom will join Facebook.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1. Predictive analytics will be applied to more business processes, regardless of whether it helps. Netuitive is applying predictive analytics to IT system monitoring. This is an ideal use for predictive analytics. But Theresa Doyon has written about how survival analysis can be applied to customer attrition and employee turn-over.

2. The U.S. will add new provisions to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to include leaked classified information. Alternately, new international agreements will surface that attempt curb leaking and punish leakers.

3. Despite this and other measures taken by governments and corporations, leaking will continue. Governments and companies will continue to try to do better at keeping secrets and intimidating would-be whistle blowers rather than curbing the sorts of actions that make whistle blowers feel the need to leak documents in the first place. This will lead to far more leaks, despite crack downs. Completely above board organizations may still have disgruntled employees that leak sensitive information, but will have far less to worry about. I don't mean to suggest that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" or any such nonsense. Many organizations have legitimate reasons for keeping information secret. But as long as organizations give employees reasons to become disillusioned, leaking will not only continue but increase.

4. Cybersecurity hype of 2011 will dwarf that of 2010. Emboldened by the likes of Anonymous, Jester and Gnosis we'll see more aggressive "hacktivism" in 2011 from the left, right and non-Euclidean. Meanwhile, we'll see more of the high-profile cyber-espionage started by Project Aurora and Stuxnet. The result will be far more hype than what we heard this year - which was a lot.

5. We'll see more CouchApp clients for popular web services. And CouchOne will do a better job of making these easy for non-technical users to adopt. If users and developers actually do start using them, we'll have the foundation for a more resilient Web. The best case scenario is that an existing client like HootSuite, Seesmic or TweetDeck will integrate CouchDB, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

6. Almost all the big social enterprise players will have some sort of "app store" offering. By the end of 2011, every social enterprise vendor will have a store like the one promised by Jive. The most successful will be the ones that make it easiest for both customers and developers to integrate apps deeply with the host platform's offerings.

7. Adobe will try to acquire Joyent. This year, Adobe announced that it will acquire the content management system vendor Day Software, which just happens to be one of the biggest contributors to the popular open source Apache web server. Joyent is the sponsor company of Node.js, a popular framework for building lightweight web servers and other server-side applications.

It makes sense that Adobe would want to be close to Node.js, but the acquisition would be about more than just acquiring the flavor-of-week development framework. I've written about how Adobe is building its own stack. Both Node.js and Joyent's core Infrastructure-as-a-Service business would fit into this strategy. Acquiring Joyent would put Adobe in the cloud computing game, which is something every big vendor wants to be in on.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Filtering, harassment, arrest and torture of bloggers and other users of social media will increase exponentially. There has been a geometric increase in the last several years, but I believe this coming years will see every traditional tyranny fully embracing the Chinese model: technical, legal, social oppression online. Most democracies will more closely travel the trail earlier blazed by Australia, sacrificing civil rights to a make-believe safety. The U.S., followed by many European democracies, have been traumatized first by terrorist attacks, and now by Wikileaks, into clamping down, and are edging, however hesitantly by comparison, toward the Chinese model.

3: Non-profit projects like Worldreader will increase in number and penetration based on the above increase in access.

4: Breakthroughs in the qualitative nature of computing - metamaterials, quantum computing, etc. - will spark a new generation of computers whose end-result will be a definition of "computer" as different from what we have now, as what we have now is from the abacus.

5: Rampaging kill-bots will range across the landscape, snapping people in half with their merciless metal claws and spitting them on their liquid-metal handi-hands. They will be bested only when a rule-breaking space captain and a lovable rogue partner to destroy their logic circuits with the Epimenides paradox.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Facebook/Google fight turns out well for end users in 2011 as both companies release tools and services to make our lives better, while competing to be the top Web destination worldwide.

3: In-app purchases take hold as new way to monetize apps, but the trend almost drives you nuts as even the silliest, most useless free apps try to make an extra buck through in-app purchases and virtual goods. (Want even more fart sounds? Check out the premium sounds here, only 99 cents each!)

4: Everyone rushes out to buy the Verizon iPhone. Later, Apple reveals the iPhone 5 with NFC built in. Everyone rushes out to buy that too.

5: Did I say NFC? Oh yes I did. We get a glimpse of the future of mobile commerce this year, but retailer buy-in won't happen in the next 12 months, sorry shoppers.

6: iPad continues to rule the tablet PC world, beating its Android competitors with ease. However, tablet computing as a trend continues, eating away at desktop/notebook/netbook sales.

7: Thanks to an increasingly diverse landscape of mobile platforms, developers turn in large numbers to HTML5.

8: Apps stores. Everywhere.

9: Badges fade in popularity.

10: Foursquare, not as fun as you first thought.

11: Facebook Places. More fun than you first thought.

12: Facebook Messages. Nope, still doesn't kill email. Nice try, though!

13. Chrome OS launches on netbooks to middling sales. People prefer tablets now.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: The idea of the "real-time Web" will become the standard as dynamic, real-time content permeates every corner of the Web. Beyond updates, commenting, and news, the movement toward real-time will finally begin to fully realize the connection between the Web and the Internet of Things. Instead of hacks and mashups telling us when the next bus is coming or what point in the journey our package is in, we'll have real-time tracking via RFID or other IOT technologies.

3: Mobile payment systems will continue to make in-roads in the US, especially as online payment systems become more widely accepted. They won't, however, have the same traction as these same systems in countries where the realities of everyday life necessitate them. (IE mobile payment systems in parts of Africa help workers protect themselves from getting mugged on their monthly pay day, according to one story I remember hearing on NPR.)

4: Speaking of money, we're going to see Facebook really do something with its virtual currency, Facebook Credits, over the next year. So far, the company got rid of its virtual gift store and made credits available for purchase using PayPal. They're now usable for in-game purchases, but we have yet to see the cross-over to the real world. We might see Facebook Credits become a real live currency in 2011, with users having the ability to buy tickets to events (remember that Eventbrite partnership stuff we saw earlier this year?) and maybe even make phone calls over Skype (there has to be more to that Skype/Facebook partnership, right?).

5: Over the last several months, we've heard more and more that Twitter is not just a place to go and tell us what you did for lunch - it's a place to go read about what other people ate for lunch. Okay, I jest. But really, Twitter is working on transitioning to a more consumer friendly, consumption-based tool and that's what we're going to see in 2011. The website redesign was just the beginning. Now, the company is going to figure out (beyond a list of 10 trending topics) how to filter and aggregate all that content and make it useful to the average Web user. And then stick some more advertising in there, likely of the local variety.

Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the predictions, the more risk of them not coming true! Without further ado, here are my predictions for 2011 - 5 serious and 1 not so serious.

2: eBooks will hit 20% market penetration by the end of 2011. In 2010, the Association of American Publishers reported that eBooks made up 9.03% of total consumer book sales - compared to 3.31% at the close of 2009. I'm predicting this growth to rocket in 2011, thanks to a plentiful supply of cheap eReaders and a long overdue price war on eBooks between Amazon, Barnes&Noble and others. I predict it will reach 20%, in other words one in five books in 2011 will be sold as an eBook. If that bold prediction comes true, it will be great news for book consumers and will silence eBook skeptics about the future of eBooks. Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting paper books will go away, just that eBooks become much more popular and utilized.

3: Internet of Cars will be the surprise hit of the year. This year we saw further commercialization of services that connect everyday objects to the Internet. In 2011, I predict that cars (not smart homes, smart grids, etc.) will be where the most innovation and mainstream attention happens for Internet of Things technologies. Apps like AutoBot will gain traction over 2011.

4: Internet TV tips and gets huge consumer uptake. In 2010 there was a lot of progress in this sector: Apple TV re-design, Google TV, Boxee, Roku, Clicker and other developments. Most of this activity was largely experimental though, in that no one vendor got the formula quite right. For example, the launch problems of Google TV at the end of this year. However in 2011, consumers will flock to these products as they mature and more Internet TV content is made available - particularly in the U.S. market, but hopefully to international markets too.

Picking a breakout product is difficult, as each of the main players offers something different. I don't think there will be a breakout product, although Google has the broadest capabilities and so it has the potential to become one if it gets the product right. I predict that Google won't dominate this market though; and neither will Apple.

5: A major pop music star will do something amazing with web technologies, that blows open the online music scene. Arcade Fire set the scene in 2010, with their experimental collaboration with Google on an HTML5-fueled interactive video. In 2011, I expect an even bigger star - someone innovative like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, or a totally new star - to do something that re-defines what music means online. That could be something new in a live show, a music video, or something completely unexpected. To get more specific, I'll bet on something that blends a live album with internet technologies - which sells unexpectedly well and thus sets a trend in the music industry.

6: Bonus prediction: by the end of 2011, the most viewed YouTube video of all time will no longer be Justin Bieber. Instead it will be a collaboration between an unknown comedian and a breakout new baby. I'm envisaging a combination of comedy tap dancing and baby giggling (perhaps recorded using an auto-tune device). Yes, 2011 will mark the return of viral comedy and laughing babies to the top of the YouTube charts - this time as a duet!

According to Forrester's five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. Furthermore, the eBook market is ready to triple itself, with $3 billion in sales by 2015.

We spoke briefly to James McQuivey, the author of the Forrester report, who told us that Forrester came to its numbers by asking consumers who have eReader devices how much they spend on eBooks. In the end, he told us, the average eBook consumer spends $60 over the year on eBooks. According to McQuivey, many publishers said they expected the number to be even higher from what they had seen with purchasing patterns. McQuivey offers a snapshot of the eBook consumer market in his blog post:

Just 7% of online adults who read books read eBooks. But that 7% happens to be a very attractive bunch: they read the most books and spend the most money on books. And here's the kicker - the average eBook reader already consumes 41% of books in digital form. Oh, and that includes the people who don't have an eReader yet, which is nearly half of them. For those that have a Kindle or other eReader, they read 66% of their books digitally.

According to McQuivey, once people start reading eBooks instead of traditional print media, they're hooked, meaning the shift to eBooks is well under way. "From here," he predicts, "things will move so quickly that by the time the dust settles, the book business may actually be the most digital of all media industries, even if it got the latest start."

As MIT notes, that's an incredible result. Maybe too incredible. The article then questioned some of the methodology involved with this project. For example, tweets from around the world were used instead of just U.S.-based ones, which seems an odd choice given that the intention was an analysis of the U.S. stock market. However, during 2008, Twitter's user population was largely American, so this factor alone does not entirely discount the study.

Calmness Linked to Stock Market Changes

What's interesting about this analysis of Twitter moods is that out of the six states GPOMS measures - happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness - it's the last one, calmness, that's most useful in predicting stock market changes. None of the other indices, including those from OpinionFinder - a more general positive/negative sentiment indicator - reflected any stock market changes.

The researchers admit that they don't know why or how this selection of Twitter.com user feeds was able to make predictions so accurate, and they say more research is needed.

Using Twitter to track the stock market is nothing new: StockTwits, for example, is an online community of investors where users sign in with their Twitter account to keep track of stock-related news. The service pulls in tweets tagged with a $ before a stock symbol (ex.: $AAPL). Competing service FINIF Financial Informatics, does something similar - it gathers sentiment reports in real-time from SEC filings, news headlines and Twitter. FINIF scans all recent Twitter updates that reference a stock symbol and then measures the sentiment using a custom word list to create the "sentiment score" for a given stock.

However, neither service purports to offer stock predictions on this level based on either the news or the fluctuating "moods" of the Twitter user base. In the future, perhaps, that may change, as this sentiment analysis research continues.

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We'd love to read your predictions in the comments.

Richard MacManus, Founder & CEO, @rww

1. There will be a breakthrough consumer application for Internet of Things - involving the iPhone, RFID tags and a major consumer product such as books or groceries. In general, Internet of Things will ramp up in 2010, with thousands more everyday objects becoming connected to the Internet.

2. Google will acquire PostRank and promptly consign it to the same graveyard Feedburner went to.

3. Microsoft will acquire Wolfram|Alpha and Bing will continue to make small gains in the search market. Google will be distracted by increasing consumer complaints about content farms polluting Google search results.

4. A price war will erupt in the e-book market and Amazon.com will offer the lowest prices, leading to it gaining a dominant position in the market with its Kindle E-book Reader.

5. Google will partner with a large PC manufacturer from Asia, which will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by Chrome OS in the U.S. market. It will become a hot consumer item among school kids and university students.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer & VP of Content Development, @marshallk

1. Google Wave will win some respect back as people discover valuable uses for it and get used to the user experience.

2. Facebook will open aggregate-user-profile and social-graph data for outside analysis.

3. Some serious user interface innovations will blow our minds.

4. Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable.

5. A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from; it may be mobile and location-centric; it may focus on personal content recommendations.

Sarah Perez, Feature Writer, @sarahintampa

1. MySpace doesn't quite make a comeback, but gets a fresh start of sorts with its music and entertainment offerings. The Gen Y/Gen Z demographic sees growth on the site but the network's overall numbers continue to decline.

2. Twitter launches ads.

3. TweetDeck finally launches a web version and becomes the number one Twitter client other than Twitter.com.

4. Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.

5. The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before.

6. Meanwhile, Android becomes the number two mobile platform by year-end.

7. iPhone app backlash begins. There are too many worthless apps and no decent way to find the good ones. Then Apple surprises us with a brand-new feature that improves greatly upon their "genius" offering to help us find new and useful apps via iTunes.

8. iTunes announces a web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition.

9. Spotify finally gets the green light in U.S. and people go nuts for it.

10. The netbook craze dies down. People start buying new "in-between" devices that are slightly larger and more powerful than today's netbooks, but smaller, more lightweight and cheaper than regular notebooks. Features like better processors, separate GPUs and SSD HD options set these new "ultra portable" devices apart from the traditional netbook, but they're still often called "netbooks" because of their size. Market confusion ensues.

Jolie O'Dell, Writer & Community Manager, @jolieodell

1. MySpace relaunches as a content network, leveraging the bands and filmmakers they already have on board and dropping the emphasis on social networking.

2. Twitter will find a monetization model and launch things like ads and pro features.

3. Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with "the Internet." They'll make more money and control more data than ever before.

4. iPhone's exclusivity with AT&T will come to a breaking point and we'll see network-agnostic iPhones.

5. On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they're asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn't the Internet know they have a Facebook?

6. File-sharing will continue to be shut down around the world; by 2011, we'll all be downloading via Tor and the U.S. will have instituted a lame three-strikes-no-Internet policy.

7. Cybercrime will be more of an issue than ever. Expect to see a major governmental security breach in 2010, as the government continues to adopt 2.0 tech without strong and permanent infosec personnel and procedures in place.

Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart Writer, @SuzyPerplexus

1. AR: Geo-locational games and AR will come together in 2010. We're going to see strange behavior from those playing zombie shooter games on their commutes.

2. Agree with Sarah: Netbooks and gadgets like the PsiXpda are going to gain ground.

3. Mobile Music: Offline music caching will be expected of all streaming music apps.

4. The browser really will be the new OS.

5. Payment Systems: Between Square, PayPal X and advances in Internet TV, we're going to see payment options integrated in unlikely places.

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise Writer, @podcasthotel

1. Cloud computing will go through a shake out. There are just too many companies out there for the market to sustain. The big players will go on a buying spree. The consolidation will deeply affect users. Some companies will fold overnight. Users will lose access to their data, leading to a whole new wave of skepticism about cloud computing. But it won't be enough to slow down the move to cloud computing. More companies will consider the security risks as less of a factor, compared to the cost benefits and potential for innovation. Cloud computing technology will become more of a commodity. The business applications for cloud computing will take center stage.

2. The big players will come back strong. IBM, SAP and Microsoft will innovate just enough to show big gains with customers.

3. Consumer-based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of "social middleware" - services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise.

4. A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market.

5. iPhone, Android or the Blackberry? I expect the Android to be the talk of the enterprise, especially if the Google Phone does make it to market. Such a phone would eliminate carrier costs and break down walled gardens that have limited application development.

Sean Ammirati, COO, @SeanAmmirati

1. Facebook will go public and the IPO will be a huge financial success.

2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry's coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper.

3. Apple will release an "iTablet" and the world will be a better place for it. OK, more accurately we'll all think the world is a better place for it.

4. Agree with Jolie regarding "the death of the login." I'm hoping for open distributed alternatives along with Facebook and a handful of others.

5. Between Boxee's continued development and a new AppleTV (hopefully synched with their iTablet), it will become much more common to enjoy the Internet on a TV.

Elyssa Pallai, Marketing & Experience Manager, @boulderservices

1. Skype becomes increasingly pervasive, as the younger generations force their parents to get online, and consumers find new and interesting ways to cut costs and save money.

2. Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud - including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching.

3. The online user experience has a renaissance, as web browsers and hardware become more sophisticated and designers and developers take advantage of that.

4. The growth of Internet of Things continues, RFID tags in everything. The initial bugs will make funny things happen all around us.

5. iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice.

6. Consumers bypass carriers and create open wifi networks for all (which is already happening but not en mass).

Jared Smith, Webmaster, @jaredwsmith

1. Backlash against the App Store causes more and more developers to defect to Android and competing platforms.

2. Google Chrome's market share increases at Firefox's expense. Internet Explorer continues to lose ground as more rich, HTML5-aware Web apps spring up on the scene.

3. Opera begins to struggle, as WebKit becomes the rendering engine of choice on mobile devices.

4. Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product.

This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com - a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will "being connected" mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we've called social media will evolve in 2010.

Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies

By this time next year, social media will no longer be "social media" -- it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices -- Web, mobile, TV, and video -- will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years' lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities -- from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting -- nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology

With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon -- enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content

2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically -- content find-ability -- will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. "People don't realize that everything they do -- on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards -- is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It's not a healthy model." Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"

It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media's pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social "media" to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, "Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment," said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

Next page: ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter

ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter

Return on investment on social media activities has been challenging to most companies this year. Surveys show only 18% of companies say they saw meaningful return on investment from their social media activities while the other 72% report modest, no return or inability to measure the return on their investment in social media. While the definition of ROI is evolving to better fit the world of relationships and networks, the ability to demonstrate ROI in hard numbers -- not in followers or fans -- will become a baseline business requirement in 2010. Already, both traditional firms and startups are working feverishly to demonstrate they can turn hype into science. But, only those companies who will be able to analyze and predict hard returns on investments will last.

Finally: Real, Cool and Very Bizarre Online-Offline Integration

Virtual worlds, games and avatars were just the beginning of the online-offline integration. In 2010 we'll see a greater push on this front as distance and physical walls will matter even less. Augmented reality -- already integrated into Yelp's latest geo-tagging enabled application -- will allow users to find relevant information and people depending on their location; Twitter360 will help people find each other, connect and see updates by location all while on the go through their mobile device. People will be able to scan products on shelves but process the sale online; you'll never need to ask for a business card again at events -- and you may actually get promotions and discounts that match your interests.

Many "Old" Skills Will Be Needed Again

An economic downturn coupled with the surge of social media eliminated many traditional marketing and PR roles. But this year, we'll see the return of professionals to the field. Enterprises will turn back to marketers who specialize in understanding customer psychology and who are experienced in addressing these both offline and online. Research and development divisions will turn to customer experience professionals to draw on user needs and ideation as part of their product improvement and innovation process, and sales and support will continue to deliver services online. Expect to see job postings for social media managers, social media psychologists and social media executive administrators to help manage the infinite tasks involved with communities and social media campaigns.

Women Will Rule Social Media

2009 revealed the growing role women play online. Women make 75% of all buying decisions for the home, and 85% of all consumer purchases. Social networks have at least 50% female members, and it is women ages 35-55 who make up the fastest-growing population on Facebook -- not the expected Gen-Y population as previously anticipated. Previously limited by organizational hierarchies and job demands, women today are free to create, express and promote themselves using social media channels. Innately excelling at communication, relationship building and multi-level attention, women will take the reins on their careers and network becoming both a sought-after consumer segment as well as driving business strategies for social-media-connected companies.

Next page: Social Media Will Move Into New Domains

Social Media Will Move Into New Domains

As social media becomes integrated into our experiences online, it will have an impact on verticals such as nonprofit, job training, education, and health care. University of the People -- a UN-backed initiative to offer free education in emerging markets -- is using the power of distance learning and virtual collaboration. Obama's campaign for job training also highly relies on the power of online interaction. "The top 10 companies to work for are going to become learning companies. Instead of having 10% of time to philanthropic activities, they'll spend 10% of time on learning or teaching," says Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and director at iStrategyLabs.

"Sites like I'm Too Young For This, and Know Cancer Community prove that no topic is too complex for social collaboration. These site help people connect and share information previously only available to their doctors," says Jennifer Benz of Benz Communications, a consultancy that works with companies to introduce social media capabilities into employee benefits and health care communication. "Companies who integrate social collaboration and conversation into health care find they have more knowledgeable employees and patients who can make smarter choices and improve the quality of their care."

Social media as we knew it even 6 months ago has changed. By this time next year, it will have become fully integrated into everything we do online and offline. By the end of this year we'll see a move toward greater control over content and companies will fight over social media land grabs in preparation for the future.

By next year, we will no longer speak about social media technology but about what we've been able to do with it. We will discuss power of ownership and only accept quality, relevant content. As we move to automatically accept a narrowed selection of the mass content online, we will begin to crave larger reach again and the natural process of chaos and order -- constriction and expansion, convergence and divergence -- will repeat itself in an ever-accelerating pace.

Whether you are an individual, a startup, small business or a large corporation, an online presence and an ongoing conversation with your constituents is a baseline requirement -- and will take time and expertise. Companies are diverting resources and rethinking their traditional outreach strategies. "Whether you're recruiting, looking for investment, trying to get buzz -- you need to be visible," says John Nogrady, director, emerging business at Microsoft bizpark, and serial entrepreneur. Brian Zisk, founder of SFMusicTech, which is taking place in San Francisco this week, says "If you're out there as a genuine contributor in the community you can reach out to many people. Take the FooFighters' free Facebook concert, or Zoe Keating -- a local artist with over 1.2 million fans online. Their ability to connect with their fans was made possible because of the Internet."

As you read this, it may seem far reaching but so did a presidency won through the power of online community not too long ago. Whether you are a novice finally giving in to the pressures to "get on social media," someone who is highly experienced, or a visionary already looking for the next big thing, you will play a role in social media in the coming year even through your simple, daily actions. And as the social media wave dissipates into the vast ocean of connected experiences, the term itself will become an entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias and we will embark on a new era of knowledge, accessibility and experiences unbound by distance, time or physical walls.

Photo by Francois Bouly