What do we have to look forward to in 2008? As those responsible for the growth and success of our associations, being able to scan the environment to have an idea of what is/isn’t important is a key skill, albeit a very time consuming one.

That is why I have decided to dedicate Tueday’s in 2008 to trendspotting and attempting to identify existing and emerging technology and social media trends that may have an impact on associations, large and small. To initiate this series, I thought I’d take a look at some predictions / macro-trends from a few of the better known experts in technology and social media have offered as influential or important in 2008 and aggregate their findings. Next week, I’ll compile my own synthesis of the trends and potential implications on associations.

Smart Mobs :: Marius Chitosca

Marius offers his summary of a few findings of a few findings that he has come across; most notably from Leverage Social Media and Social Media Method. From Rod Amis at Leverage Social Media he noted the following social media trends:

1. The rise of the first pioneers in Internet 3.0 aka the semantic web.
2. Mobile phone wars ala Google and Apple.
3. The legal battle between Microsoft and Open Source Software rages on specifically around the patent domain.
4. User generated media; specifically broadcasting continues to grow as does it audience.
5. With the upcoming presidential election the online political machine kicks into high gear but its efficacy is still in question.

He continued on to the social networking trends by offering a synthesis of Gary Hall’s, the president of Pringo (a social networking platform) trends by Erick B. from Social Media Method.

1. In order to maintain stickiness in 2008, brands will need to employ social media tools and user-generated content (UGC).
2. The greatest growth in social media will be in affinity groups and niches.
3. Social media sites will reap the benefits from an increase in advertising dollars being spent, but consumers will reject advertising that is not tailored for their specific needs.
4. Customer-facing companies that do not employ social media tools in their external communications and customer relationship management strategies will lose to competitors who actively adopt these.
5. People will continue to spend more time on the Internet; however, they will hop from one web site to another less frequently, only spending time on social media sites and networks that fully engage their interests and values.
6. In 2008, a more mature audience will embrace online communities, even though the young early adopters acted as the initial catalyst for social media.
7. Major corporations will use social media tools for building better communication with employees, replacing outdated intranet systems.
8. Mobile social media will take off in 2008.
9. We will start to see market consolidation. Larger social media players will acquire smaller, common interest sites so that the established portals remain competitive, attractive and relevant.

Marshall Kirkpatrick :: ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb never fails to create outstanding content. Their trends for 2008 are no exception. Not only do they offer a number of great thoughts on what the year ahead may bring, but they also offer a myriad of great resources to help their readers stay on top of the trends including a lot of links, OPML files for their feed favorites on the topics and specific recommendations. Their trends include:

1. Open Data: Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day. Some of the subthemes include the following.
   1. Data portability
   2. Open Id
   3. Google’s Open Social and Android mobile operating system
   4. The rise of data-centric start-ups
   5. The personal data aggregation and publishing tools called Lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, named one of Time’s Top 50 Websites of the Year, or the bleeding edge Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms and Soup.
   6. APML
2. Semantic Web - A Semantic Web has been in the works for a long time but is just starting to hit the scene for real. The idea is that semantic web technologies are able to derive meaning from online content and determine connections where none have been made explicitly.
3. Mobile - Most of the people online in this world access the web through a tiny little computer they carry in their pocket and also use as a phone. Mobile means more than just small, though. It also means portable, fast, location-aware and tied to voice, and media.
4. Visualization - The future of OpenID and many other key technical innovations, lies in communicating with people about what they can do with the tools. That is not easy to do with things that are complicated or new. Just as video has changed the web forever because visual communication is infinitely more evocative than text - so too do I expect the perceived value of visualization to grow by leaps and bounds in 2008.

Will Beresford :: beyond analysis

Finally, from Will Beresford, Strategy Director at beyond analysis, a UK-based data and customer strategy business comprised of individuals with backgrounds from across a diverse group of blue chip organisations such as McKinsey, Cap Gemini, EMAP, BBC, Thames Water, Leo Burnett, M&C Saatchi, dunnhumby and Vodafone, suggests the following trends in Social Media and Business for 2008:

1. Traditional models for consumers to research a product or service will begin to be fundamentally changed by Social Media.
2. The growth in data and content created by the social media will also bring change to the traditional search models.
3. Likewise traditional models for businesses to research their consumers will fundamentally change.
4. Customer feedback and the social network will overtake price, and in some cases brand as a major factor in online purchase decisions.
5. The data generated from Web 2.0 will be increasingly important to all organisations, not just to web based businesses.
6. The interest in large social networking sites as the next best thing in advertising will fall away as quickly as it has arrived.
7. Many agent-based, or middle- man, businesses will find it increasingly hard to justify their existence.
8. Official news will be increasingly contextualised by consumer opinion and it will become harder to discern the difference between real news and opinion.

What does it all mean? I’ll save the more thorough analysis and synthesis from last week but will quote Mitch Joel from Twist Image in a comment he left on the Future Now’s blog: “Bottom line, there is no silver bullet or secret formula. To be successful in social media is much harder than “starting to Blog.” It’s about building a real relationship.

Obviously my aggregation is far from comprehensive, so what am I missing? What technology and social media trends are you contending with that you think extend beyond your own association? What do you think we should be keeping an eye on that could impact associations? As always, your feedback is more than welcome.

Update: I was a bit quick on the trigger as I omitted a number of other individuals that I had referenced but did not include here. For the sake of offering a number of other perspectives I want to include the following additional resources:

• Lauren Cooney, Program Director, Community, IBM CTO Office for Information Management :: Web 2.0 in 2008 My Predictions
• Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, an enterprise social computing business in London (UK) on the FASTForward Blog :: Enterprise Social Computing: What will happen in 2008?

Mark Cuban posted a blog entry on Friday (thanks Techcrunch for the tip) discussing (perhaps defending) his comments regarding why he feels that the “Internet is Dead and Boring“, which has caused quite a stir. He states:

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

That’s not to say the impact of the Internet on the entire planet hasn’t been off the charts. It has been. It has changed the lives of billions of people and it will continue to be a utility to billions of people. Just like cars, TVs, Radio, Planes, Highways, you get the point.

Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn’t the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)

Now anyone who is familiar with Mark Cuban knows that he is: (a) smart, (b) tells it as he sees it and (c) not afraid of controversy. His posting is poignant and his argument is salient and logical. That’s not a bad thing and I know he wasn’t trying to downplay the significance of the transformation from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but rather uses it to justify his rationale and start a dialogue. He is also clear to point out that services like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are not the “Internet” but rather applications that run on the Internet.

Despite the compelling argument Cuban puts forward, I’m not sure that I would agree with his absolutist perspective. I think the innovation and introduction of new tools, services and applications that meet previously unmet / unknown needs has slowed down considerably, but I think that the Internet is far from boring and even farther from dead. For some reason, I don’t think I’m alone in that opinion.

A recent posting on Read/Write Web by Alex Iskold titled “The Digestion Phase: How We Got Here And Where We Are Going Next” suggests that because the Internet and technological innovation/development in general, like many other things, are cyclical we have simply entered a cooling-off period, or as he calls it a “Digestion Phase”. In justifying his position Iskold offers that:

…a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together. It is the outcome of this phase that will decide if we continue to slide or if we rebound and start climbing back up. The deciding factor will be the true value of the technologies that we created.

He goes on to describe the evolution and transformation from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and how the shift was driven by a few key advancements: broadband, blogs, ajax and social networking. He also suggests that we are simply in a clean-up period where companies, organizations and individuals are now stopping to take a look at/reflect on what works and what doesn’t and what can be done to fix it without changing its core purpose, or as Martin Fowler calls it: refactoring.

The digestion phase gives companies a great chance to improve their services. These improvements may include performance and scalability changes, user interface enhancements, the creation of an API, and compliance with standards. This is the time to simplify and to remove things that are not needed.

He closes the article by suggesting that there is no shortage of ideas just the ability to make use of them. And thanks to the pace of technological development, these cooling off periods will get shorter and shorter, especially as we grow accustomed to accepting and embracing rapidly changing technologies.

I tend to think that Iskold has it more right that Cuban, and while it may be seen by some as a boring period, I am happy that things have cooled off enough that I can catch my breath, make sense of everything that has happened over the past few years and get ready for the next wave of breakthroughs that is surely lying in wait.

Social computing is here to stay, and it looks like it is getting a formal curriculum wrapped around it as well. Susan Barnes, a professor of communication at the U.S.-based Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was recently awarded a two-year $149,786 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an undergraduate online course in the new discipline of social media.

“The introduction of social media software programs is a major change in the way that people communicate on the Internet. It is both a social and technological change that deserves academic attention,” Barnes said.

RIT’s new social media course debuts early next year to a trial group of 90 students, and will double as a case study of technology and social networking that is expected to further Barnes’ research into the potentials of social computing in learning.

“A focus of our course will be to introduce students to career possibilities,” Barnes said. “Social networking combines IT with communication, so we need students from both Liberal Arts and computer backgrounds … the types of skills that are needed in industry.”

Source: Computerworld