4.5 trends for Social Media in 2010 – Chris Thorpe

4 things rising

Twitter lists will eventually be quite huge. No doubt there will be tools to navigate them and people will try and game them and maybe even try to pay to be on certain lists, but I think their curatorial nature will prevail. They’ll be interesting ways to navigate content and will almost be like marks of quality control. It’s one thing to follow someone overtly, it’s another to list them. Curation tools around Twitter and any public streams in Facebook will become interesting news and engagement channels.

Facebook Connect. Facebook is talking a lot about Connect, way more than it does about apps. The ease of addition of some of the tools and the promise of social distribution will sway a lot of publishers into using Connect. The Open Graph API they announced last week which is due to arrive in 6 months time could be the tipping point as it will make content publishers able to easily publish into the stream. Whether users will like it or not is another question and one has to wonder at what point Facebook will see the identity providing/brokering business as a financially unmissable one.

The internet of things becoming social. The recent experiments which Lufthansa have been doing with MySkyStatus where you can get Lufthansa to update your Facebook and Twitter feed when travelling are fascinating glimpses into this future. I think you’ll see a lot more parts of the built environment pushing statuses into your stream and updating your status when you give them permission to.

Location based social networks as city wide data providers. The recent tie up between FourSquare and BART in San Francisco will be the first of many I think. Playful location based games will in the future help city planners on service provision as people’s data when gathered implicitly will always give more useful information than surveys and focus groups.

1 thing dropping

I think people will stop asking about Twitter’s business model, partly because they will have to have come up with one in 2010 but partly because tools such as lists and the new retweet functionality will put them in an important place as a real time intent/curation data provider.