Social Media Trends in 2010

Interesting fact: The American Dialect Society just announced “tweet” as the word of the year and “Google” as the word of the decade.

These are some of our predictions on what will be hot in Social Media in the year to come:

Real-time Social Media search results - The Search Engines aim to provide more relevant, timely and accurate results and talks of searching for information in real time has become reality. Last year all three major Search Engines announced the integration of real-time data from Twitter and Facebook into the search results. Already implemented, you can now see what the Search Engine is suggesting and what others are saying via social media relating to the search terms you entered. This trend will continue to grow and we can expect that this feature will be refined until it truly becomes real-time information.

Twitter integration and applications were king in 2009 and are here to stay. Either you integrate or you perish.

Tumblr is successful and growing in the shadow of Twitter, when Twitter finally loses steam will Tumblr be the new darling?

Google Wave is set to revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate online. It will allow people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

We will be sure to see market consolidation in social media leaving only a few major players on the scene: Twitter, Facebook and who else?

Social news (Digg, Reddit) and bookmarking (Delicious) will become obsolete. Already the first wave of social media that is social news and bookmarking loses against Twitter.

Location tools will increase within social networks. Although privacy concerns continue to be heard in the background, an increasing number of applications will prompt us to reveal our exact location to our friends and followers. These apps have been somewhat slow to catch on so far but as instantaneous, real-time social communications become more refined, GPS location tracking through our Smartphone is close behind.