From a product standpoint, it’s hard to deny that 2009 has been the year of the Twitter explosion. For better or worse, the simple microblogging service has changed the way we think about social media, ingrained the phrase “real-time” in all of our brains, and left our centuries-old grammatical traditions rotting in the attic, sacrificed in the name of 140-character uber-brevity.
Twitter, with its revolutionary open platform, has also forever changed the way web applications think about their data and the possibilities that come from sharing it, instead of hoarding it. The implications of this are vast and I suspect will be long-standing. Many have and will continue to wonder if this decision will have positive or negative effects on Twitter’s revenue model, and perhaps only time will tell. But it has made it nearly impossible to create a product strategy that doesn’t involve an API.
Though this may be the most important product influence to come from Twitter, there are a few more that I suspect will make their way into many of the new entries into the consumer internet market next year. To be sure, Twitter isn’t the only thing to cause these trends, but it’s almost certainly the most important. Without further ado, here are the things I expect to see in profusion over the coming year:
- The dominance of the stream. While we may have already seen the stream format of content consumption take the wheel, 2010 will be the year it achieves total domination. In recent months we’ve seen stream-based models mosey their way into almost every corner of the internet, even penetrating the veritable Fort Knox of Google search results pages. With new services springing up on this model left and right and more and more people getting comfortable with their format and aesthetics, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one major media outlet (read newspaper) moved entirely toward a stream-based interface. And I think they’d all be smart to adopt some version of it – the box and column layout of print never translated well to the web.
- Asymmetric social connections. It used to be simple: I’m your friend, so you’re my friend, right? Wrong. Twitter and every other social media service have brought us into the era of one-to-many communication – the “follow” model. I can follow you, you don’t have to follow me. While at first glance it seems to make relationships less meaningful, it can often make them more useful. From location services to music streaming, asymmetric connections are making all kinds of social services easier to engage with and more valuable.
- Stackable networking. This is the phenomenon I like to think about as ‘everyone plays nice with everyone else,’ and it’s almost – dare I say it? – web socialism. But the web has always been a symbiotic culture, of sorts, and the emergence of open data platforms and the adoption of a few open (err, mostly open, thanks FB) protocols is ultimately something that creates more value for everyone. Sure, some of these companies are probably bleeding value by outsourcing their networks, in a sense, but if that’s the case they probably aren’t going to make it anyways. The community of applications gets more powerful and more efficient, and ultimately the users are the ones that win. All in all it’s a good trend and one we’ll see continue in 2010.
- Privately created, publicly available curations. Twitter Lists is the easiest example to cite here, but there are tons of other examples of this phenomenon: music blogs and services like blip.fm and last.fm, product wish lists like those we find on Amazon and now others, and the thousands of lists of books, movies – almost anything you can imagine. I think we’ll see lots of ways to curate and then publish personalized content materialize in 2010, and we hope Pinyadda’s a big part of that trend. By giving our users a unique way to discover content from all over web and easily share what they’ve found, we hope that we might make the process of consuming content on the web just a little more enjoyable and social in 2010.
What do you think about the future of the consumer internet? Are we destined for a fundamental shift in the way we experience the web, or just a continuation of the trends we’ve already seen? And what will come of Twitter? Leave your predictions in the comments.
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