It’s this time of year again, contemplating what the coming year will bring to us. Most trend forecasts look at the web from a technological, applicative, business and processes, from a universal point of view. They usually don’t look at the web from the web experience prism of the individual.
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 fragmentation to harmonization
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.
Ubiquity
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.
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.
Social CRM – From corporate’ 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.
Blurring 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. 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.
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, competition instead of siloed competition, relinquishing traditional powers to gain new coalitions will take some more steps towards a web of life.
Author has a proficiency in user centricity and has written many articles on user centered initiatives and green web ecology that empowers a personalized web. For more information on looking at the web from an Icentered point of view, the social, marketing,harmonization,philosophical and economic aspects, you must check out this – http://www.icentered.com/web-trends-for-2011-from-a-user-centered-perspective
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