The Societal Web in 2009 – Follow Up
This time last year I laid out my predictions for how developments in the Societal Web would progress in 2009 – see here > so it’s time to take a look at how we did.
Predictions
First prediction: that world economies would shrink. We were spot on with this one, although it appears as though it was a racing certainty, at the time the ’smart money’ was expecting the total world economy to continue to show growth overall, it didn’t. Highlighting that web traffic and business models of social networks would change was also right.
The second prediction: that search companies would start using authority to direct future searches.
On this one we’ll give ourselves a partial success. More people are using and searching on Twitter than ever before and there’s definitely been a change in the underlying algorithms used by the search engines. The use of authority hasn’t been as rapidly taken up as we expected but we expect that trend to continue.
Third prediction: collaboration will become more important. On this we give ourselves a resounding tick, and again we think this trend will continue.
Our fourth prediction was that there would be fewer new social networks, again a partial success on this one. Perhaps the major significant new entrant is FourSquare. Aggregation has continued and evaluation of social networking sites has fallen as predicted.
Fifth prediction: about semantic recognition of content we feel has been missed.
Our sixth prediction: about the importance of wide and deep networks seems to have been realised and without doubt there are more opinion leaders in the social media sphere. Partial success.
Our seventh prediction: that social networks would develop a more serious focus. Again, partial success. We think some social networks have developed a more serious focus while others have moved in different directions.
Our eighth prediction: that governments would struggle to maintain traditional economies, maintaining interest rates at or close to zero and money supplies would grow as governments printed money in order to get things moving, absolutely spot on. We also suggested that one global organisation in each major market may fail before each market can recover, and again we think that’s holding true. But the third part of that prediction: that the UK would hold an election which would have an indecisive result has not been realised; it’s inevitability for 2010 that the election will take place. The result appears, at the moment at least, to be more indecisive than previously thought.
Our ninth prediction: social pressures arising from unemployment will put a strain on society as a whole and petty crime would increase has not been realised, thankfully. We also anticipated that the UK and US would pull away from foreign wars whereas in fact they’ve increased their involvement in both major areas of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, so on that front we missed.
Our final prediction was that societal opinions would become polarized in the early part of 2009, that new ways of working together would emerge as we begin to focus on helping people as individuals rather than relying on centrally controlled decision making. Sadly, I think on this too we missed. These things have not yet happened but we still believe that they will.
Overall, we’re pleased with our predictions and feel that we made a reasonably good stab at seeing what would happen in 2009. Our 2010 predictions will follow very shortly.
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