Social Media in 2009: Our Predictions and Desires
Over the past year, we've been inundated with social media. We've seen Twitter go mainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we've tried what felt like a million different applications. We've joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?
What Will Our Social Media Experience Be Like in 2009?
Given the current economy, there may be fewer applications and services to try next year. Whatever will we early adopters do? We love to flit from service to service, trying the latest shiny new thing, endlessly discussing whether or not it will stick, whether it will "cross the chasm." Without the endless barrage of new services being released one after another, in 2009 we may find ourselves having to more deeply embrace the ones we have left. More importantly, we'll finally have the time to figure out how we can really integrate them (or not) into our daily lives.
As we discover how to better manage the social media apps we added to our daily workflow during 2008, we may end up turning a more critical eye towards any newcomers in 2009. Enriched with a better understanding that doesn't come just from being enamored of "shininess," but from experiences that grew over time, we may question the new arrivals in ways we never did before. What value does this bring me?, we'll ask. Is this really doing anything new?
Thankfully, the answer to that last one will likely be "yes," as the funding possibilities for straight up clones of popular services will probably be dialed back in 2009.
What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better
For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.
Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves drawn to the apps, services, and features that helped us better organize the madness that is information overload. We added our friends to lists in both FriendFeed and Tweet Deck, we categorized our RSS feeds and even cleared out some for good, we de-friended the strangers we had collected on Facebook, we synced our social network friend lists, and we found ways to multi-post to our preferred networks. Yes, we became more efficient..but there's still so much room for improvement.
Our Social Media Wish List
Perhaps next year, we'll see more apps that help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day. We have some thoughts about what we would like to see and we hope that 2009 will bring these ideas to fruition.
Google Reader add-ins and/or Greasemonkey scripts:We want Labs for Google Reader! It seems Google is more interested in revamping the Reader UI than giving us any real tools to deal with our RSS overload. If they won't help, then someone else should. We would love to see tools that let us view our feeds based on our attention data, without having to manually reorganize the feeds ourselves. We also want duplicates marked as read - if we read a friend's shared item from a feed we subscribe to, why do we have to see it again as we plow through our unread feeds? Finally, we need tools that let us better filter our subscriptions to reduce noise. Why can't we click a button to hide all the posts where someone has spliced in their delicious links or Twitter updates, for example? - Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard? The tools could parse our friends' Twitter profiles, for example, to categorize people based on location, business, or company. All the local people could be in one list. Everyone whose profile says "SEO" in another. Anyone in the top 50 or 100 users (based on followers/friends) in a third list called "noteworthy." Just because we want to customize and personalize our lists doesn't mean we couldn't use a little help getting started with the task.
More Friend Synchronization tools: We want to friend you - really we do - but it's hard because you're here and there and everywhere. To make matters worse, you don't even use the same username on Digg as you do on Twitter. How will we ever find you? What we want is a tool that allows us to friend people, with one click on all the networks we possibly can, according to our preferences. It should also be able to delve into our social graph and sync up the friends we have already added. - Friend List Sanitizers: OK, we followed/friended you, but we don't know why. We don't know you, we don't have any friends in common, in fact, we think you might have requested our friendship by mistake. So why are you still in our Facebook friends list? We need tools that help us clean up our lists to remove the accidental "stranger friendings" left over from our MySpace days. Even better, the tool could compare our Facebook list to our FriendFeed or Twitter friends to see if we know you elsewhere in order to determine whether to retain or remove the friendship.
These are just a few social media tools we would like to see developed in 2009. What are yours?
Image Credit: Noise - GetEntrepreneurial
Comments
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Sarah,
Great post, out of all of the prediction posts, I think I agree with yours the most. We will see more useful start ups that will have better business models in 2009 which is a good thing. I also think we will see more talent moving into the industry from others due to layoffs.
In addition to your wants I would also love to see better mobile integration and more location aware apps that are helpful.
Kipp
Posted by: Kipp Bodnar | December 17, 2008 9:18 AM
I think (hope!) the trend will begin to see social media simplified down to a few mainstream services that work well together. There is an enormous amount of overlap in social media web applications, and widespread adoption will continue to suffer as long as it is so fragmented. There is a very active social media user class that is not the mainstream, and its easy to forget that most people on the Internet are not engaged in any of these tools.
In the meantime, I hope to see the competing "connect" tools distilled to a clear winner (or multiple winners that are transparently interchangeable). This could largely make which tool you use a moot point. My vote is with Google (who doesn't have a Google account, after all), but only time will tell.
Also, given recent acquisitions/hires as well as the flood of great add-on applications, I think its going to be a very exciting year for Twitter. I can't wait to see what they have up their sleeves.
Matt
Posted by: Matt Wiseley | December 17, 2008 9:27 AM
Great list!
I'd love for a way to categorize friends within social networks. Categories within Facebook and Twitter for co-workers, in-person friends, influential bloggers, businesses, etc. Also a way to rank those tweets/profile posts that we want to follow more closely than others (I often miss friends' tweets).
One more wishlist item is the ability to manage social networks from the desktop. Twitterific does an OK job for tweets, but something that integrates multiple social networks with the organizational power of Adium (tabs, combining friends from different services, history search, link to address book).
Looking forward to seeing how much things will have changed in December 2009...
Posted by: Sherry Main | December 17, 2008 9:28 AM
It needs a woozy avatar! Isn't it? : )
Posted by: Erhan Erdogan
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December 17, 2008 9:44 AM
huh?
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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December 17, 2008 9:44 AM
We all want, need, one thing, and one thing only: Portable data.
'Nuff said.
http://diso-project.org
Posted by: Todd | December 17, 2008 9:53 AM
I think a friends list sanitizer would be sooo clutch. Especially in facebook - I know it is easy enough to go through your list but facebook servers are kind of janky sometimes.
http://www.justinpopovic.com
Posted by: Ted | December 17, 2008 10:20 AM
I think twitter groups will solve some of the issues there.
I think we are about to get rush of startups releasing new stuff in an attempt to get more funding or to actually get something out before the money runs out.
I think 09 will be a good year for innovation and I for sure hope to be bringing it.
Posted by: Darren | December 17, 2008 10:57 AM
I'd like to see more social sites meeting practical needs. Giving people cause to connect offline. That's what we're trying to do for bands and music fans.
http://www.betterthanthevan.com
Posted by: Todd | December 17, 2008 11:11 AM
I totally agree with you here: "come try this, it helps." That's one ideal that'll *never* go away online, even when we're done using the social-buzzwords years from now. If we look at the sites that are still around from the late 90's, we'll see they all have this in common. Sure, we've got lots of fun, entertaining sites, but in the end who do they really help? They'll only be fun for so long before they become yesterday's fad. We need to serve a purpose and help more than anything.
Posted by: Scott
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December 17, 2008 11:40 AM
I would like a combined e-mail/twitter/im/blog tool where I could store all my contacts, and then choose
- IM to send urgent messages/questions to one
- e-mail to send to one/many
- twitter to broadcast info/questions - TAGGED
- blog to broadcast more detailed info
Facebook is probably the closest today, but I want an efficient desktop tool that integrates these social media tools. And I would like a 'professional' tool for productivity, not for fun (lots of alternatives for that :-)
In short, I want ONE tool with various broadcasting possibilities.
Posted by: Atle Iversen | December 17, 2008 2:11 PM
nice content thx..
Posted by: Oyun Haberleri | December 17, 2008 2:17 PM
Sarah: I said that this user at the center of these web services should be dizzy! I'm talking about the image here. :-) Nothing else. : )
Posted by: Erhan Erdogan
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December 17, 2008 3:21 PM
friendfeed is in the center right?
Posted by: mike "glemak" dunn
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December 17, 2008 3:28 PM
Good post, as always ;-)
In fact the most needed is a separate "personal" User Interface in which I would define what social services I want to use in which situation (professional-collegues; professional-external, professional-myself, friends, family, known persons,...).
At the moment I just use my brain... but it is becoming more and more difficult :-)
Posted by: Jac | December 18, 2008 2:52 AM
"Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard?"
No, it is not so hard ;) Blummi.com has exactly this feature. So stay tuned, we will release soon ...
Posted by: Blummi | December 18, 2008 5:01 AM
Sarah, I agree with you here, I think with the economy like this now there may be fewer applications and services to try next year but I think the ones that do will push try there best to push the envelope to improve or simplify the services out there...
Posted by: Yellow SEO | December 19, 2008 8:09 AM
I think the "More Friend Synchronization tools" is the sum of all the applications made reality. With this action people will finally everything with just a few operations. That would be amazing.
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Posted by: shiva | December 20, 2008 11:10 PM
A single user interface to maintain contacts and provide communication would be ideal. I find it difficult to keep up with them all.
Also, some sort of tool to keep track of traffic.
Posted by: Portland Real Estate | December 21, 2008 11:39 AM
Great post!!
I think Auto categorization of friends functionality is required so that we can categorize our professional frds, business network & personal frds.
I have a regular visitor of your site & love reading your posts. Keep up the good work.
Thanks
Posted by: seodoz | December 21, 2008 11:07 PM
I don't agree that information overload is the problem, as Clay Shirky says "information overload means your filter is broken", read this interview with him:
http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all
Posted by: Karl Long | December 22, 2008 12:39 PM
I think we can all only hope that there's some consolidation and it all becomes a bit easier to manage. I've almost given up as of now on trying to integrate all my different accounts/logins together until something finally happens. I can only hope that Greader starts to 'learn' what I like and all social networking sites pick up neat tricks like the 'suggested friend' lists in Gmail.
Roll on 2009 :)
Posted by: Neal McQuaid | December 23, 2008 8:58 PM
Intresting post.
I am not sure I understood, why do you need auto-categorization tools?
I thought Google already proved that searching is much better from any kind of categorization (e.g. DMOZ, Y! Directory etc.)
IMHO, the solution for the social mass/mess is a social search engine and not auto-categorization tool.
Posted by: Moti Karmona | January 2, 2009 5:34 AM