Cameron Olthuis

Tagged again, by Pete from Mashable and he’s asking what my predictions are for 2007. So I’m going to look into my crystal ball and see what it’s in store for the coming year.

1. Social Media. It will continue to grow as people waste more and more time watching people do stupid things on YouTube. The majors like Digg, Delicious, and YouTube will keep growing. Most others will fade into oblivion, although we’ll see a couple of brand new startups with unique angles come out of nowhere and make some big noise.

2. Niche. As more people get comfortable with social media, social sites for every little niche will popup. They’ll gain enough adoption to sustain themselves and we’ll all live happily ever after.

3. Mobile Web. It won’t go anywhere because staring at a 1″ screen is annoying and not very practical. It will continue to be used only for email, checking RSS feeds, and wasting time with Twitter.

4. Vertical Search. We’ll see some good vertical search engines created because it makes sense to only search one site instead of ten. Most won’t execute properly though and there is only room for 1-2 winners in each vertical.

5. Social Media Marketing. It will be a strong year for SMM and we’ll see companies start putting a lot more resources towards it. The agencies who don’t get it will still take money from their clients but since they won’t be able to produce results they will resort to social media spam that will do more harm than good. Oh wait, that’s already happening *cough*Edelman*cough*. Social media spam will become an epidemic and the sites that can’t control it will die by the wayside.

6. Ignore SEO. The startups that continue to ignore SEO will fail because they don’t realize that’s the only way the masses will ever find them. The founders will continue to think SEO is spam as they scratch their heads trying to figure out why their companies bombed.

7. YouTube on TV. Someone, somewhere will figure out a way to seamlessly bring YouTube directly to the TV. They will be acquired by Google only if they can manage to beat them to the punch.

8. Politics 2.0. I already predicted this earlier in the year. We’ll all be so overwhelmed by all the flame wars and dirt that cover social media sites that no one will even show up to vote. A lot of money will be spent on reputation management this coming election.

I tag Neil Patel, Britney Spears, and You.

mypredictions2007