Icentered takes a personalized prism in trying to point the influence of 2011 web’s evolution trends on us, individuals.

The social web
The social web will continue to drastically evolve in the coming year. From the industry’s point of view, 2011 will be a year of social business integration,  a sign of the mainstream maturity of social marketing.  From an icentered prism, the social web expanded from its original mission to facilitate and empower sharing of our experiences with a trusted circle of friends, to become a central component in digital life, with implications to many web life aspects. In the coming year, the social web will continue to evolve, creating more complex issues, problems to solve, challenges and new paradigms to consider.
         From fragmentation to harmonization – Currently our social web experiences are still fragmented through a multitude of platforms. We communicate through Facebook, Twitter, Skype, chat, Gmail, IM… Yet, as users, we strive for more intuitive, simple and unified social platforms. A trend towards consolidation will continue, with efforts like @Facebook.com ’s social inbox. In parallel Google integrated social into its search, facilitating social findability. The trend of moving away from fragmented experiences in a diversity of social networks and the need for integration takes a higher stand as the coming year will see increased efforts for harmonization and diversification of offerings, and the fight over hegemony over becoming our consolidated social portals, will motivate Facebook, Microsoft, Google… to increase offerings and tie us even more to them.
Social life may become more harmonized, but it will bring about the problems associated with data retention, manipulation and all privacy apprehensions that are associated with corporates’ siloed platforms and users’ stickiness. As privacy concerns will not fade away, and people will become increasingly aware of privacy breaches and, we will have to become more alert  to the hidden interests of  harmonization of social platforms  and will strengthen the emerging awareness to the conflicts and need for  user controlled paradigm shifts that will protect us.
·         Ubiquity – Our physical 24/7 connectedness will be even further empowered by real time ubiquity and sharing through new personal gadgets with more advanced apps. With the launch of the Ipad at the beginning of the year, a whole new market segment of tablets, Google’s Android platform for the smart phone market, are empowering our always-on perpetual  accessibility wherever we go, whatever we do, catering for our fun needs ( music, videos, reading, games, entertainment…)to yet higher levels, with intuitive sharing built in. It will   facilitate our connectedness anytime, anywhere with everybody, through all devices, with a plethora of apps adapted to all platforms.  
·         Affordability of new gadgets, smart phones, reducing communication and surfing rates will expand  mass usage of 24/7 social connectedness with our friends anywhere anytime and will enhance a  new breed of location aware apps.
·         Integration of social features in websites, apps and tools – will allow for  intuitive sharing of our surfing.  Many traditional sites will continue to make their sites more social by introducing Like buttons, sharing plug-ins, opening pages in social platforms and getting involved in social discourse to allow for more interaction.
·         Social connectedness – The coming year will continue to empower  our social connectedness, on the virtual, social and philosophical level, through web enabled platforms that facilitate it. This connectedness will become part of our web identity, by getting more involved in social, political and environmental activities of web life and in our localities. We will be more active through social platforms, empowering social do good, entrepreneurship and micro contributions and we’ll try to make a difference and influence, as a reaction to our growing frustration and disappointment from existing institutions. More of us will get involved in bottom-up initiatives to better our life and lives of others and revive trust.
·         Social CRM – From corporates’ prism, the coming year will see an increase in social marketing and evolvement in engaged social brand identities. Brands need to have a presence on the social sphere, because we converse through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, embrace recommendations from our social sphere as trustworthy, and become more averse to aggressive marketing. Therefore more companies will develop a social web presence, in order  to interact and engage with us through social discourse. They will try to generate trust by a change of tone, in almost a non commercial way, attentive to our feedback , with careful  phrasing of brand claims and marketing messages. The result will be an overpour of product and brand pages in our social networks, a fact that in itself raises a debate on whom will existing social platforms eventually serve. It yet remains to be seen if it weakens the internet as a trustworthy platform or harms its neutrality.
There’s light at the end of the social CRM tunnel, because brands will adopt an engaged profile. We will continue to witness an increasing humanification of brand identities that cultivate social causes, engagement and involvement and present values that exceed the functional or life style values of their offerings. Many will include an environmental,  social and communal identity, as a means to create a new dialog.

Finally money spent for good.
·         Bluring boundaries between business and private life on the social web – The increased real time visibility creates a new hybrid of reference bases that will only grow in nature and blur traditional segregations. Both we, users, and companies, will increasingly use the social space for business needs – such as customer service, personnel recruitment through social references, cooperation, we’ll harness the social web to get more trustworthy, real time results.

Trust  

Distrust continues – our faith in financial institutions, commercial providers,  sustainability of economics, in politics… disintegrates.  We do not put our trust in corporates’ lip service of having our best interests, integrity and data preservation at heart. We are frustrated, angry and disappointed. Marian Salzman talks about rage  as a decisive power to shape attitudes in the year to come. Frustration, loss of faith, aversion distrust and annoyance with traditional norms of opaqueness, interests that do not put us citizens/consumers/individuals first.
We will strive for a relation with brands, providers and organizations that seem to have a real meaning, whose discourse inspires credibility, integrity, we will bond and put our faith in those who truly reach to bond with us and not monitor or impose on us from their detached corporate ivory towers.
This brings about several phenomena that will only accelerate in the time ahead.

Transparency

We came to take social sharing for granted. It enhances openness and transparency of what is happening with my friends. Same expectation will become a culture that will grow. What is happening with our providers? Or more so – what is happening with the information our providers have about us. Intolerance to lack of transparency will continue to ferment.

 Distrust brings about an urge to disclose. As much as the example of Wikileaks will remain controversial, because of the yellow peep-hole nature into the dark corridor of global politics, of the information leaked, and the life endangering and world level damages, the phenomenon will not die. It is inevitable and unstoppable. As every bottom-up phenomenon, it feeds on subversive distribution that challenges existing orders.  As these lines are written, a new platform ,  OpenLeaks, is launching. People who will consider themselves gatekeepers for the rights of citizens, consumers, that are unhappy with cultures and ethics – will use this platform and others that would presumably mushroom, to enhance transparency and ethical conduct and warn of wrong doing. That would undoubtedly force organizations – political, governmental and corporate board rooms to exercise more transparency and sharing, so they do not find themselves hostages of frustrated employees.  Although it’s abuilsing curve, its very existence will contribute to a new culture and mindshare.

Context awareness

Context awareness is still in its infancy and still has a dual impasse at its very nature. From our prism – context signifies the greatest return on attention in the information overflow. When the web will evolve to become web 3.0 or the semantic web, we will expect applications and gadgets to know enough about us to cater for our needs in a relevant and optimizing way. But to date, this vision still poses a threat of a big brother constantly monitoring us and manipulating our data for corporate profit making.  That only enhances privacy concerns.
The other side of context awareness is that it is not ripe today, definitely not in a user centered way.  It does not serve us, it serves corporates that will kill to put their hands on such data for data manipulation purposes. Personalization and context are still not perceived as personal data services that should be catered for user side.
In the coming year attempts to partially enhance context awareness will still be localized through sensor based context aware computing units within gadgets such as mobile phones, TV remotes etc, but not as a universal context service, that monitors and analyses all our web activity on our behalf.
A better society

One of the most prominent trends that will dramatically increase in 2011 is based on we want a better world and we do it ourselves.  Soft values of empathy, caring, replacing greed with compassion, will continue to have a growing impact in brand identity, corporate social involvement in the community, environmental awareness, do good initiatives as part of identity building. The good values will enhance constructive capitalism, as Umair Haque, calls it. The result will gradually bring about a participatory web ecology, that will pave the way to new paradigms, that truly put users at their center.
This will not happen in the year to come, but more building blocks will lay the foundation to the realizations that the upper limits of existing paradigms  create glass ceilings that do not empower adapting to the new world and cultures fermenting under our feet. Quality, soft values, trust, transparency, coopetition instead of siloed competition,   relinquishing traditional powers to gain new coalitions will take some more steps towards a web of life.

It was a very tumultuous year. So much happened. Obama… swine flu… economic collapses… and yet the words of the year 2009 put web based social media on top – a linguistic manifestation of the extent to which social media has become a mainstream part not just of the web fabric, but of our life.

Oxford dictionary has chosen UNFRIEND as the word of the year. 

Unfriend – “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

The Global Language Monitor  has announced that the  result of its annual global survey of the English languagethat Twitter is the Top Word of 2009.  The Top Words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.58 billion speakers.

Twitter –  a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters unfolds.”

It shows the increasingly central place of the web fabric in our life as the social network  becomes a basic reality.

A variety of recent trend predictions for the social web see an evolution in the making – but no big breakthroughs. To sample just a few:

Axel Scultze presents an interesting prediction for the social web 2010. The outstanding trends he foresees are:

• Twitter will become the leading news system
• Advertising will flood the social space
• LinkedIn will grow significantly
• Social business will thrive as more businesses will enter the social web
• IT departments will open up to social web and adapt the new processes needed for opening up
• Social media marketing will use social media differently
• Social mobility will enhance distributed enterprises and new working models
• Exposure of social graph information will cause some loss members due to privacy concerns
• Corporates will monitor social networks to listen to the customer’s voice in social networks to fine tune offerings
• Social networks will converge with other applications, media and platforms
• Gaming industry will have a stronger presence on the social  web
• Gadgets and add -ons will be developed and used for social applications to enhance communications
• Search will include geo aspects and will include relations
• Groups, communities will not consolidate but will strengthen in impact

He concludes by speaking about the need for earth shattering innovations to manage relations, but assumes that won’t happen in 2010.

David Armano points at 6 social media trends for 2010:

• Filtering will make social media less sociall
• Social business will beef up
• Corporations will look to scale their social business activities and will create incentives for social participation
• Companies will develop social media policies
• Social media will go mobile as users and workers will want to be part of their social sphere
• Sharing no longer means e-mail
  Jennifer Leggio concentrated her 2010 predictions around the question will social media reach ubiquity?  And asked over 30 people from her social media network their opinion on this question.

A variety of views. Fascinating.

 Joel Postman , foresees in 5 social media predictions for 2010 foresses that:

• Augmented reality applications will become mainstream
• Location-Based Applications Will Dissolve Into General Social Networks
• Enterprise Social Software Applications Will Become Commonplace
• More Social Media Regulation Will Follow the FTC’s October Endorsement Guides
• Social Search Will Shake Out, and the Search Metaphor Will Change.

All of them look at the social web from the point of view of the system or from that of corporate who want to use it to reach a goal, as Brad Ward compares it to  a horse race.

To take to a higher scale, beyond next years’ predictions, Jeremaiah Owyang, when he was still at Forrester, wrote a very interesting analysis on where the future of the social web.  He looks at the future of the social web from the point of view of the system.

“…If you can’t see where this is headed, I’ll tell you: all of what we’re doing from our clicks, queries, wall posts and tweets is teaching the ’system’. In the long run we’re creating a massive global computer, an artificial intelligence, and someday, a thinking being.

When the system will reach a stage that it learns about our behaviors, preferences, relations… When such a system’s automation becomes a holy grail, we users should be very afraid – no,  Panic Stricken.

What exactly is that system? Who owns it? How much does it know about me? Is it transparent? Is it all in my consent?  Who owns all this knowledge about me?

When considering an intelligent web, the first thing we need to guarantee is that this web is ours, the people who comprise the people’s grid.  Anything short of a user-owned-web there is no guarantee of who will end up serving whom and what giant wars will evolve over the hegemony of all this.

Adrian Chan ponders on the future of the social web  and examines the system from a user centric prism that looks at my past interactions, forming a social centric prism that learns from my social usage patterns and my interactions with my social sphere.

It still assumes some top down external management that combines several aspects of learning – and as such – raises the same apprehensions.

The future of the web from an Icentered point of view – a people’s grid

The next evolutionary stage of the social web will exceed systems’ learning and will take the human side of the web – us, its users, as the anchor point. From an Icentered point of view, the future of the social web is about the people that comprise it, each one of us, as a member in the people’s grid. It will create a social web that harnesses personal context to add meaning to the communications.

As such my social sphere is all about me.

 I am an Itom in a people’s grid.

With me at its center, my context is the anchor point through which I interact with my social sphere. Taking a holistic approach I am complex, dynamic, holistic, me all across and therefore exceeds the current closed boundaries of social networks.  It means that  I will no longer have to actively sift for relevant friends from a multitude of accumulated social network contacts and actively take care of portability between communities.

Same is true to all others.  All Itom will create  a people’s  grid. Relations and conversations will be contextualized.   It will turn six degrees of separation into a context based social graph of connectedness, both within my social sphere and in its extended perimeters. So that I can communicate with my social spheres through a contextual anchor that ties us ad-hoc to that communication,  regardless of network, place and time.

It will assume:

• Portability and harmonization of my context across disjoint networks,
• Adaptivity to my usage patterns across platforms and devices
• Proactive privacy management of my social relations
• Ad hoc context based sharing around an interaction
• Active participation in business models and food chains around me and my social sphere