Brian at Webpl.us, where I co-author, tagged me for some pre­dic­tions for 2007. So here goes my list, which is a com­bi­na­tion pre­dic­tion and wish list.

The first five are about social net­works (SN), in no par­tic­u­lar order:

1. Pre­dic­tion: Social Net­work­ing gains wide­spread adop­tion and recog­ni­tion. Remem­ber 10 or 11 years ago when most peo­ple didn’t have an email address? And when most didn’t have a mobile phone? Well, despite the suc­cess of MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, Flickr and other SNs, most peo­ple still don’t have their pro­file up on the web. By the end of this year it will become the norm to say: “find me on [insert SN name here]”, just like it became the norm to have a cell­phone and to have one or sev­eral e-mail addresses. And dat­ing ser­vices will see a drop off in users as peo­ple real­ize they can meet their mate just as well on a social network.

2. Wish: Social Net­works add micro­p­res­ence lifestreams. Ever notice how sta­tic SNs are? Peo­ple spend a lot of effort in cre­at­ing their pro­file and then let it just sit there for lengths of time with no updates. Of course, when you change jobs you’ll update LinkedIn or when you break up with your part­ner you’ll go back to spruce up your MySpace pro­file … but these events are (rel­a­tively) infre­quent. Of course, some SNs like MySpace have a blog­ging tool, and that’s fine. But to make things even more dynamic and lively, expect SNs to inte­grate a Twit­ter- or Jaiku–like lifestream which can be imme­di­ately and eas­ily updated by IM, by mobile phone, by email or any other sim­ple way. Face­book is doing some­thing sim­i­lar already by allow­ing you to dis­play your other RSS feeds in your pro­file, like your Flickr stream. After all, Social Net­work­ing is all about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, be it syn­chro­nous (IM) or asyn­chro­nous (pro­file, com­ments, lifestreams …). And lifestreams give peo­ple an instant sum­mary of what’s going on in your life, giv­ing them more oppor­tu­ni­ties and rea­sons to con­nect with you.

3. Wish: Social Net­works add geolo­ca­tion. Flickr did it (and it rocks!). Plazes is it. Your blog may have it. Expect to see it on more SNs as well. What is it? loca­tion. As the Where 2.0 con­fer­ence says: “Loca­tion is going every­where.” It makes sense to tag your con­tent (pho­tos, video) with loca­tion … and soon you’ll be pub­lish­ing your own where­abouts, while retain­ing con­trol over the level of loca­tion you want oth­ers to see. Why is this a nice to have? So your social net­work in other cities knows when you’re in town. And so you know when some­one from your social net­work is in town. And so you can com­mu­ni­cate this infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to shoot off emails to announce your travel plans.

4. Pre­dic­tion: Social Net­work­ing does not goes mobile [yet]. Some SNs, includ­ing Xing.com and aSmallWorld.net, offer some mobile func­tion­al­i­ties. But we’re still wait­ing for a MoSoSo (mobile social net­work­ing) cat­e­gory leader. Who will get it right? It won’t hap­pen this year, yet. Any­where. When munic­i­pal wi-fi, WiMax and/or ser­vices like Fon go wide­spread, MoSoSos will gain trac­tion. Any­way, peo­ple first need to get com­fort­able with online social net­works (see pre­dic­tion 1) before going mobile.

5. Pre­dic­tion: Face­book gets acquired. For mucho dinero. My guessti­mate is Yahoo! will make a bet­ter offer than last time, per­haps for $1.3B (YouTube is worth more), some­time in the sec­ond quar­ter. Yahoo! will do some­thing to shore up its stock price and may make a big move in social net­work­ing, which could be excit­ing. See more acqui­si­tion bait here.

6. Design online will explode. My friend Car­los at Scrap­blog says it best: “In 2007, user-generated con­tent will focus on “design online” rather than just shar­ing pho­tos and videos online.” I’ll blog more on this later.

7. Wish: Sec­ondLife grows up:

- Lin­den Labs will setup an inter­na­tional cur­rency exchange and accept other cur­rency, not just US dol­lars. Cur­rently, local entre­pre­neurs are pick­ing up the slack by buy­ing and sell­ing Lin­den Dollars.

- Lin­den Labs will out­source and off­shore. But it needs to fig­ure out what its core processes are first and then out­source and off­shore the rest. Any­way, out­sourc­ing and off­shoring would enhance Sec­ondLife by mak­ing it more inter­na­tional, through the influ­ence of for­eign devel­op­ers. As a friend of mine says, “it would be bet­ter to have an inter­na­tional work­force because they’ll [Lin­den Labs] get the  cul­tural dif­fer­ences that would affect their design deci­sions”. Cur­rently, SL has a very American-centric view of things and for instance there’s no sup­port for Asian char­ac­ter sets or bi-directional text.

- Lin­den Labs will add new grids to Sec­ondLife. Some­thing must be done to reduce the lag, and mul­ti­ple grids should be considered.There’s already a sep­a­rate Teen grid, which is a good idea any­way for other rea­sons. It prob­a­bly doesn’t make sense to sep­a­rate peo­ple into grids by geog­ra­phy (ie., Europe and US) since the load may already be bal­anced by dif­fer­ent time zones any­way, but addi­tional grids should be added to relieve the strain on the world. (Another grid in SL could be like another con­ti­nent in RL, where it would take you time to travel to and yet be inter­con­nected in cur­rency and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.)

- More com­pa­nies and uni­ver­si­ties will set up inworld, aided by new inter­ac­tive agen­cies, includ­ing Crayon and The Elec­tric Sheep Com­pany. These new agen­cies become acqui­si­tion tar­gets for exist­ing adver­tis­ing and inter­ac­tive agencies.

8. Wish: User-generated video adver­tis­ing. There’s user-generated video con­tent (YouTube). And there’s GiggedUp, where employ­ers and can­di­dates post videos along­side job descrip­tions and resumes. So there should be user-generated videos for adver­tis­ing the stuff you want to sell: your bike, your car, your elec­tron­ics … Even if it’s a 10 sec­ond video, it’ll give peo­ple more con­fi­dence in items on sale than a pho­to­graph. Some­body will cre­ate this and eBay will buy it, all within the year. What do you think, Gil?

9. Pre­dic­tion: Blog­ging will have its biggest year yet in terms of growth in active blog­gers, num­ber of posts and adver­tis­ing dol­lars. Why? The run-up to US and French pres­i­den­tial elec­tions and other polit­i­cal issues will pro­vide lots of stuff to talk about.

10. Wish: Miami’s tech scene grows up. The WeMe­dia Miami con­fer­ence in Feb­ru­ary, Bar­Camp SoBe and the Webpl.us and Refresh­Mi­ami groups help orga­nize the Miami tech scene and get the ball rolling for more events and con­fer­ences and even­tu­ally star­tups. And the UM School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is devel­op­ing new web tech and comm courses that will help build a local tal­ent pool.

Photo credit eRmood

Tech­no­rati Tags: mypredictions2007, pre­dic­tions, 2007, tech, web2.0

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