predictionfest

Oops, I forgot to post all of these. Here are a bunch. This is from January the 10th.

One of the things I love about all this digital gubbins is the speed it moves at. This makes the January prediction-fest a bit of a challenge, but, all caveats duly asserted, let's have a little think about what might go on in 2008. We're going to start, this week, with the big media story of 2007 - social networking. And, if we're going to do that we have to start with Facebook, not becuase it invented anything new, it wasn't the first social network, but because this was the first time that the chattering classes and media pundits paid attention and saw the point. Facebook's contribution in 2007 was to get a huge mass of people into the social networking idea, but Facebook enthusiasm is waning rapidly. This is partly because they've made some notable goofs about the way they deploy advertising and deal with people's privacy but it's mostly because Facebook isn't really about anything. It's just about itself. The strongest social network sites seem to be about something other than just socialising; they're centred on what the theorists are calling Social Objects - for flickr it's photography, for MySpace it's music. Once you've poked everyone you know, and maybe played scrabble with them, what is there to do on Facebook?

Which doesn't mean Facebook is going away, far from it. Facebook will grow, will make money, will be beloved by millions of people. It just won't regain that sexy excitement that gives it disproportionate influence and gets everyone talking. It's like the ITV of social networking; a great way to reach lots of people, but unlikely to give you cutting edge credentials. We'll see masses of closed or abandoned Facebook accounts in 2008 as people who used it to discover the worth of online networks migrate to smaller, more intimate sites; more focused on the things they're interested in, or the lives they're leading. Sites like Dopplr or FFFFound.

Dopplr is a network for frequent travellers. You tell it where you're heading to and it shares that information with your friends on the network, leading to increased serendipity as you realise that nice guy you haven't seen for years is going to be at that same conference as you in Frankfurt. And you get together and have a beer. It's not about online chat. It's about meeting up in the real world.

FFFFound is another great example, especially for all you art directors. It's a site that lets you collect and point at great images you've found online. The social interaction is minimal; no chatting, no games, just the sharing of images. And yet FFFFound users still feel like they're in a community. If you can get an invite it's worth having a look. (Next week: video)