The Year in Search and Social: How Did We Do? Rating Last Year’s Predictions
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 22, 2008 | Share This
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This is the time of year when we at SearchViews like to gather our best minds together to prognosticate on what the next year will bring us in the world of search engines and social media. Before we whip out the Ouija Board to contact Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne, Ms. Cleo, and TV’s Patricia Arquette from Medium, we wanted to look back and see how accurate our last round of predictions were. Or, “Were our predicts totally redic?”, as the kids might say.
So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:
Top 3 Bullseyes:
1. RSS adoption will start to hit the mainstream – Yeah it’s happening, you just don’t know it (kind of like getting trashed on eggnog). Every time you download an iPhone app, use Twitter, or use a news aggregating site you make use of RSS. Like zinc oxide, it’s everywhere.
2. The music industry will continue to be heavy handed and litigious rather than figure out how to monetize their product online – Today’s news that Warner Music is pulling its music vids off of YouTube is further proof that cluelessness still reigns in the music biz. Wait, I hear you asking, what about the fact that the industry announced they would no longer be suing individual users? Well, like any greedy plaintiff you want a defendant with deep pockets like an ISP, or an un-monetized start-up business like Project Playlist. Wait, a start-up what? That’s no way to make money guys! On the other hand we were thankfully wrong about Hype Machine – they have remained unmolested by lawsuits (as far as we know).
3. Yahoo’s Kickstart will fold - Kickstart was Yahoo’s attempt to rival LinkedIn in the realm of career social networking. What they didn’t know at the time they launched was how many of those folks looking for a job would end up being Yahoo refugees.
Top 3 Fails:
1. Yahoo and Google get their social media act together – Our number 3 bullseye above was perfect, except we couldn’t leave well enough alone. We also had this idea that Yahoo would use personalized start pages to link people up with each other and build a real social network. Didn’t happen. We also roped Google into this and to be fair, they made some baby steps by adding SearchWiki to users who are logged in. Still, this brings them closer to actual social networking like Sarah Palin was a foreign policy expert because she could see Russia from her house.
2. Government officials will start to adopt social networking/blogging as communication point with constituents – This was a major fail on the federal level. I mean seriously this is the Bush administration we are talking about, not exactly a paragon of open government. The president-elect is using YouTube as the medium for his weekly address so this still may come true next year.
3. MySpace will lose ground to Facebook, becoming lost in the wind like Friendster – Not so fast, Facebook may have gained ground in leaps and bounds in 08 but MySpace got niche-y with it – becoming more focused on music and on their younger demographic. Let the olds use Facebook to connect with their fellow Class of ’79 members.
So we won a few and we lost a few. Stay tuned to SearchViews though, our exciting predictions for 2009 will be posted very soon. In the meantime feel free to send me your predictions, your thoughts, nay your very dreams, on Twitter at @nmallin.
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