2012 came, and social networks are still omnipresent. Here are some educated guesses about them in 2012. I wouldn't call these predictions because I don't have hard data to support them, but from my point of view of a social startup founder, they seem very likely:
- major social networks will continue to converge in terms of features and user experience. Just as facebook copied the cool features of Google+ last summer. Twitter's new look is also a step towards the "generic social network" - tracking conversations with one click, inline media content, a unified notifications page (@username). LinkedIn already has a stream, with "like" and "share". My favourite example is the pinned top bar introduced by Google+ and immediately copied by facebook and twitter. So, by the end of 2012 it will not make much difference which social network you share to. Only the audience may differ.
- 3rd party clients and tools will thrive. Since you now have three (or four) major social networks, aggregators will attract more users. It's a bit annoying to the same thing three times. But to enable this Google+ have to release a full API. By far twitter has the best API, while facebook has been struggling with numerous bugs or undesirable side-effects (like reducing the EdgeRank of posts by 3rd party apps). The addition of Google+ is very important for the 3rd party client apps market. While currently you have only twitter and facebook (LinkedIn is not a place where you share your usual twitter and facebook stuff), and there are a couple of tools that automatically synchronize your streams (with the ugly #fb hashtag for example), now with Google+ the matrix grows, introducing a lot of "sharing overhead" which can be handled by more advanced client tools.
- inbound marketing in social networks will rise - techniques for targeting and engaging larger audiences with social network status updates will be developed and improved. Just like SEO, there will be analysis of how to be displayed on the facebook home stream of as many users as possible, or when is the perfect time to tweet or share to Google+. People are developing "blind spots" for traditional adverts, so exposure will be sought in different ways.
- who will conquer the web - facebook is now everywhere - like buttons, comments, fan boxes. While this may be viewed as a subset of the first point above, it's more than that - Google and twitter will try to infiltrate every website with widgets that provide value to users. There are already +1 and tweet buttons, and live hashtag results, but this will expand in attempt to reclaim some of the territory facebook has already conquered. What will be the point of that? See the next point.
- adverts will continue to be the number one business model. Although inbound marketing is more engaging, less intrusive, and although alternative business models exist, adverts are the simplest to implement. Twitter already fell into that hole, and is likely to be followed by Google+ (with adwords)
- social reputation will fail - there are a couple of social reputation "engines" that give you some kind of score that try to reflect your influence. The bad thing is that this score means nothing, and users simply don't have an incentive to go back to check their scores. An alternative scenario is for these engines to morph and develop more competitive features to employ some game mechanics.
- there will be more attempts to create an "open social network". After the initial hype, Diaspora is not becoming a facebook killer, but the general idea that people's online social interactions shouldn't be owned by a single vendor will find its way in new projects.