With 2010 coming to a close, the blogosphere is littered with predictions for 2011, including for the social media space.
This isn't one of those posts. This is a post about stuff that won't happen in the space next year.
Facebook Won't Be Bought, Ever: The social networking giant is never going to be purchased. Zuckerberg and company have come to the realization that what they built is bigger than any other business in the past five years. The company is the voice of the web. It is the home base for marketers and social media junkies. But it's also the web-home for mommy's, kids, aunts, uncles, colleagues, parents, corporations and the like. Basically, Facebook owns the web and that ownership will only grow. At some point, the company will go public and that will be the end of the company's coolness.
Location-based Services Will Never Go Mainstream: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Yelp, etc...they are cool applications, but have no real value to consumers. Facebook Places on the other hand, will be successful and have consumer value because of the volume of users on the social network. As for the B-team, these services will continue to create noise in the space and compete against each other — in essence, canceling each other out. Facebook will be the winner here.
Twitter's Advertising Strategy Will Not Be Successful: No one wants ads in their stream. Some brands might pay for paid tweets, but users will glance right past them, just like they do with ads within third party apps. They are an annoyance and don't provide any value to the user. Period. The only way Twitter will make money is if they close the network and charge for premium accounts. However, it won't work. It would be like if Google was going to start charging consumers to use their search functionality. Users will find other means, i.e. Bing and Yahoo.
What do you think won't happen in social media in 2011?
Article first published as 3 Social Media Anti-Predictions for 2010 on Technorati.