Peter Griffin gave his perspective on the hot trends of 2008 in the technology space. Rod has already commented on the mobile data issue so I’ll not add to that debate. Rod commented in the past on his doubts arond social netowrking (or facebook anyway) so I’m sure he’ll be happy to pass the baton to me on this one.
Peter Griffin predicts some casualties in the social networking space next year – his prediction is that MySpace will be a victim, but Facebook will continue to grow.
My prediction is more complex than that, I believe 2008 will mark the “outing” of social media, when users demand some real value from the sites. Kind of an emperors new clothes epiphany if you like.
The value plays in social networking will come from unexpected avenues – potentially smart telcos will get on the programme, realise their legacy revenue streams are going fast, and work out how to truly monetise the social networking space. Possibly the incumbent platform players will start seeing th true value-add plays – if one looks for platform players with the smarts to do it, it’d be hard to look past LinkedIn to be a winner (or at least part of the winning group).
OpenSocial will either fly or bomb –Â I waver between the two. MySpace will retain it’s position as a pure-play social networking engine, while some of the more “grown-up” social networking sites will shift themselves to more of a transactional (rather than informational) model.
So there’s my picks for ’08. (Oh and SSD’s for all laptop manufacturers as well!)
