The outlook for the social web in 2009

With the end of the year almost here, iand a number of recent stories, now seems like a good time to take stock of what’s happening on the social web. A mini news-roundup:

1. Facebook recently tried to buy to Twitter, perhaps just before their own valuation fell too far, but for that or other reasons, Twitter held out.
2. Facebook Connect service was launched, immediately followed by a competitive open-source solution from Google, called Friend Connect, supported by MySpace and others. Bot services extend users’ web personae and logins across participating sites.
3. Browser plugins support Google’s favoured OpenID website login system, and are offered as an integral part of Flock, the ’social web browser’.

I don’t want to go in-depth on these - links are to ars technica’s

excellent coverage. But they don’t name what I think is the elephant in the room, the iPhone, and other smartphones and small portables. I think 2009 will be an important year for them, recession or not. Laptops and desktops are essentially for work, and businesses and private users properly want to separate work and personal activities. The mobile phone is anyway right at the heart of interpersonal communication anyway and now offers better keyboards, screen resolution and apps. Mobile computing for business travellers is also pretty easy now on these devices. So for one thing I think both Google, Facebook and MySpace could become a little less dominant.

So this is a time of experimentation with a lot of new potential players creating apps, and brand loyalty is less of an issue when crossing platforms, so plenty of developments are possible, e.g:

1. Social networks are used more to organize the web experience and integrate it with users social experience more.
2. Location-based apps are increasingly players in both social networking and search functions.
3. Smaller screens create opportunities for a less complicated news aggregator than Google’s igoogle page, for example.
4. The browser and home page may become less crucial because of how apps are accessed on smartphones.
5. Aggregators of social networking sites, plus systems like OpenID, mean it is easy to have multiple memberships.
6. Twitter will continue to do well because of their minimalism.

OpenID and Friend Connect might also create opportunities for business social networking apps, though people will probably use them with caution at first for security and reputation reasons. Hard to see anyone getting ahead of Twitter’s combination of usability, flexibility, and discretion over how open to be, and Twitter groups could be key to directing traffic - functioning like a bunch of loose social networks and a dynamic news and views portal at the same time. Facebook might wish they had been able to grab them while they could.