I just entered this in response to a LinkedIn discussion, thought I’d post it here to. I’ll have more to say on future later.
Bust will occur by 2012 end. Many social media companies will disappear, go bankrupt, or be bought for very little in a repeat of 1999-2000.
What will remain will be robust healthy companies with Facebook becoming the Google in social media.
Lots of lost venture capital.
Twitter as we know it will disappear, be bought or close, or it will change rapidly. It’s in trouble.
YouTube is a wild card. At some point google has to do something to this economic white elephant. Again, by 2012.
A lot of smaller businesses that are trying to sell service related to social media will close and go bankrupt, and many will feel hardships of not anticipating the crash.
Social media will largely go “broadcast” and one way. Business wise it never was much else, but people want to believe what they believe. It will eventually dawn on the densist ideologues that companies aren’t interested in chatting, and it’s not scalable.
This is already ongoing. Check out a sample of business Facebook pages to see how many comments by customers actually receive responses that are personalized and how many not.
Finally, use by regular people will constrict and social media will tend towards the fate of usenet/newsgroups in terms of content quality.
What WILL work? Mobile connectivity, and I hope, mobile voice recognition that’s integrated and high quality that enables keyboardless social interaction via smartphones, ipods, etc. Next Killer. WAY bigger than social media itself.
