The evolution of Web2.0 in 2009
The end of the year is usually the opportunity to see back what happened in order to inform what would happen next year. This interesting post gathers thoughts of 8 web2.0 gurus about the evolution of web2.0 in 2009. I gather here some of the thoughts I found interesting:
Chris Brogan from New Marketing Labs anticipates a stronger push towards the portability of identities and friends and a better bridging between different networks.Similarly, Charlene Li points out the importance of opening social networks to fully profit from profile exchanges and existing social relationships. Companies should start to think about how to leverage an existing community such as on Myspace, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Mary Hodder points out the importance for users to own their data back and have a better control on what’s happening. Compagnies like Facebook that tries to control every aspect of users life would be forced to focus more on certain aspect and abandon others.
For Tara Hunt, it is time to cease experimenting and begin to solidify the core principles. She argue that the challenge among marketers must shift from “how you control and spread the message” to “how you interact and empower those customers.
Susan Mernit’s concerns are more about the accessibility to mainstream audiences. She expect the social networks to become more widespred in order to allow everybody to experience what bloggers and gamers begin to experience 5 years ago.
Finally, Nate Ritter argue for the ermergence of location based services as an integrative part of the new mobile social network era. Furthermore, Ritter points out the importance of aggregation tools, helping people to cope with the multiplicity and abondance of messages with their limited consumption capabilities. Ritter and Richard Yoo points out the importance of the financial situation to frame the future of the Web2.0. They argue that decisive financial decision will be made serving as “natural selection” process to strenghen some of the existing models and eliminate weakers (I am interpreting here). Yoo also points out that the accent would be put on the real needs of the users.
Why do I blog this? All these considerations and prospective thoughts give me a feeling that we are reaching the asymptotic point of social media trends and the web2.0 buzz. The underlying important message is probably that the financial crisis will accelerate the slowing (pardon the oxymoron) process and the frenetic bulimia that leads to the emergence of a plethora of new entities. Time has come to leverage existing entities in order to permit to the more adaptive and well-established ones to survive and the weaker and less useful to disappear. It is probably time to go from quantity to quality.
Another important question is how the social media will spread to the mainstream. A lot of people discovered social networking through facebook in 2008. I think 2008 has been the “tipping point” of the wide-social networks and the geometrical ascension will probably continue during 2009. Furthermore, the transition from computers to smartphones will be another phenomenon we should observe across 2009. So far, I stood scheptical about the iPhone revolution with respect to social networking. However, it is tempting to say that Smartphones will give access to social-networks, to people that are not so computer friendly. To conclude, I would argue with some of the above authors that the important aspect is the real needs of the users. It is time to have a serious look to how the web2.0 is used by the mainstream users instead of taking as point of referenc, the early adopters or tech-saavies.
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