Local & Social Media Predictions for 2008
Posted by Sebastien on the 2007/12/18 at 11:25
in Ad Networks, Atomization, DiSo, FaceBook, Funding & Transactions, Local, Local Search, Mobile, OpenID, OpenSocial, Social Media, Social Search, Social networks, Trends, word-of-mouth -
Yesterday, I wrote about what I thought were the most important news in 2007 in the local and social media space. Today, I’d like to propose my 2008 predictions, an always interesting exercise.
- The year of Identity. One of the big challenges of social media is having to sign-up and add your friends in a multitude of web sites. Expect 2008 to be the year where this problem becomes a major issue and gets potentially solved through identity interoperability initiatives like OpenID.
- Social is now everywhere and open. The last few months of 2007 have set the stage for a very social 2008. Any new major initiatives will include social elements by default and will use existing standards like OpenSocial, DiSo or Facebook.
- Fragmentation & personalization of media. Given the lower barrier to entry for new local/social projects, user and advertiser fragmentation will continue to accelerate in 2008. From a user point of view, this will lead to new personalization tools allowing consumers to create their own unique media view.
- The year of ad networks. As a corollary of point #3 above, given that user fragmentation will accelerate, an increasingly large number of ad networks will pop-up to aggregate consumers into a critical advertising mass. It’s all about advertiser defragmentation. Directory publishers will want to become ad networks themselves to push their ads outside of their core destination sites in order to increase their total reach.
- Content wants to be distributed. That’s the second corollary of point #3. Increasing user fragmentation requires content producers to atomize their content and push it in the fabric of the web. Think of your business in terms of content units or atoms (some inspiration came from Clay Shirky’s “fame vs. fortune” post from 2003).
- Social graph-based search. I am now a firm believer that social graph-based search will be the future of search (including local search) and we will see this concept gain some tractions in 2008. I think humans will always trust recommendations and advice from people in their “social network” (friends, family, colleagues, known experts, etc.) more than a machine. Online word-of-mouth is the biggest local search opportunity out there.
- More M&A activity in local. 2007 was quite active from a local M&A (Idearc buying Infospace’s directory business, Citysearch/InsiderPages, AT&T/Ingenio, Marchex/Voicestar, etc.) but I expect 2008 to be even more active given i) the need for directory publishers to execute on their strategies and ii) the need to aggregate traffic to increase advertiser ROI.
- Mobile: the year before the big bang. 2008 will be the year where a solid mobile development base (open devices, networks, platforms) is established leading to an explosion in 2009. Watch for the Google spectrum bid in January.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:18
Great list. Rooting for #4 and more choices for little guys than adsense. Look forward to reviewing this list in Dec 08!
January 1st, 2008 at 02:19
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January 13th, 2008 at 08:59
I too am excited about the possibilities for 2008. As I read the list and got to #8 I was especially hopeful that 2008 is truly the year for mobile. With so many people being mobile, with cell phone being everywhere and are on almost all the time they truly have the potential to be the ultimate convergence devices. I just hope this is the year the carries partner with the many application developers allowing our handsets reaches their full potential. Will need to check your list in 12 months and hoping that mobile rises in the rankings.
January 14th, 2008 at 04:01
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