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My Horrible Predictions for Social Media in 2009

Here’s another staple of the New Year’s media programing calendar: New Year’s Predictions. Not only is it a list (people love lists), but it also comes with a built-in lead-in, the postmortem of your prior year’s crappy predictions. (Though if your previous predictions were really, really bad, you can probably skip this step. It’s not like anyone remembers what you said last year, anyway.)

As I didn’t do predictions last year, let’s just move on to setting myself up for future embarrassment, with my horrible predictions for social media in 2009. When I say my “horrible” predictions, I don’t mean they’ll be dire — I mean they won’t be very accurate. Though I don’t imagine that it’ll be a banner year for the business of social media, or any other kind of business.

Now, historically, I’ve stayed away from making predictions, mostly because I’m not very good at it. (For example, I thought that DSL would beat Cable for home broadband access, and I didn’t think that being able to watch TV shows on a computer screen would be very compelling. Boy, were those stinkers.)

But I figure that even if I’m terrible, I can make others (like certain 70-percenters) look better by comparison. So in that way, anyone can be useful. So here’s my list:

1.) President Obama will find a way to use his beloved BlackBerry after he takes office, although in a more limited fashion. Also, the Obama administration will transform government with social media, on a level not seen since Al Gore transformed government with his “Reinventing Government” initiative. (Note: This is a joke, implying that it didn’t really accomplish all that much over the long-term, despite some claims to the contrary.)

2.) We’re going to see a substantial, even severe, winnowing of social media apps and networks. (In other words, Bubble 2.0 goes *pop*). A lot of redundancy is going to be removed, and it won’t just be the economic downturn to blame, but a lack of sound business fundamentals on the part of many ventures. Like, say, a real business plan with a path to profitability.

Just like in other brand areas, in any given category, pick a winner, an also-ran, and a few niche players. All others go bye-bye. I’m going to go out on a limb and anchor this with a specific example: Plurk will go the way of Pownce. They might even skip the “bought out” part.

3.) People still aren’t going to use OpenID very much.

4.) At least three more major metropolitan newspapers are going to go Web-only. We’ll also see some movement on broadcast/newspaper integration, if not on the legal side (because of ownership laws), but on the content partnership side. If you’ve ever read an article on a TV news Web site that’s basically Teleprompter copy (which may work on air, but is horrible as a printed article), there are plenty of opportunities here.

5.) Something’s going to happen with Twitter. I’m going to go with “fade into the background as more of the hoi polloi jump on, and a new shiny thing comes on the scene.” Hell, after I started using Twitter more, I started wondering why one of the major messaging clients didn’t just come up with a Twitter-killer last year. I’m still wondering.

Others would disagree with me. (”Why Twitter Will Go Mainstream in 2009.“)

Anyway, those are my predictions for 2009. Let me know what you think, or post a link to your own predictions for the new year.

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