It’s nearing the end of the year, so why not give a shot at playing fortune teller – here are some predictions for what will be up (and down) next year:
- A great number of old-media sites will integrate social, “Web 2.0” features into their online properties. We’ll see a few copies of Digg, a few MySpace-like clones, a couple del.icio.us’ and plenty of maps mash-ups
- Google’s market share will rise in search and Ask’s will, too (only slightly). Yahoo! and MSN will stay flat or slightly decline (allthough Yahoo!’s a pretty darn good engine at this point).
- Yahoo! will continue to have success with content projects; their news, finance, sports, entertainment and new projects in Food, TV and Answers will bring them a greater share of the web audience as a whole.
- MySpace will start an inexorable decline, possibly late in the year, into the forgotten world of Xanga & Friendster. That’s the problem with relying on 12-22 year olds for the majority of your page views; they have a short attention span.
- LinkedIn is going to continue to have success, as will Last.fm, Zillow, Flickr & YouTube – those Web 2.0 properties that have a unique niche and audience are going to thrive while a lot of minor entrants play second fiddle.
- Wikipedia’s credibility is going to suffer; as a source of truthiness, it’s great, but the pranksters, spammers and agenda-based edits will eventually make enough of a dent that on any given article, the chances of accuract will be low enough (80-90%) to make it unacceptable as a research tool.
- In the SEO world, the practice of viral media generation and marketing (aka the good kind of linkbait) will continue to spread in the world of high-profile SEO firms, but remain very rare among smaller, local firms.
- Cloaking (the good kind) will grow as more and more websites using AJAX, personalization and geo-targeting find that they can’t serve Google the same content they deliver their visitors.
- Comment spam is going to remain at its current levels – most of the people who will adopt nofollow (ever) already have and the remainder are still providing enough value to blog spammers to make it worthwhile to continue operations.
- Windows Vista won’t fix email spam… In fact, it will still be a problem in 2010.
- Yahoo! and MSN will get their own versions of Webmaster Central/Sitemaps. This will be a very, very good decision.
- Social media marketing is going to rise in prominence and value as a link building tactic.
- Blogging will start to slide in popularity, though possibly not until 2008 or 2009. People won’t stop reading them entirely, but other publishing platform styles will take a chunk of the audience and the writers.
- Microsoft won’t acquire Yahoo! (I’m not saying it’s not a good move, I’m just saying it won’t happen).
- Buying links is going to remain an effective way for websites to rank for low and mid-level competition phrases.
Disagree? Have some of your own?
