farner(in)

I just want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope you start 2009 off right! ;]

Speaking of the New Year, I don’t have a resolution yet. Do you?

Rather than subject you to an elaborate opening paragraph, I’ll just give you the beef.  Here are my 5 ballsy social media predictions for 2009.

1. Twitter will be bought.  By who?  If I had to guess, I’d say Google.  Then they could do away with that Jaiku mess they’ve been hiding.
2. Plurk will disappear.  Now that Twitter is much more stable and catching on with some of the mainstream, other microblogging services will suffer. But who? Pownce has already been put down, Jaiku might as well be dead and FriendFeed serves as more of an aggregator and has enough to set it apart. That leaves Plurk, a service that, in my opinion, is just a fad waiting to fade away.
3. Louis Gray will surpass Robert Scoble in blog traffic.  Louis has himself plus a talented team of guest posters, and as much as Robert tries to be everywhere and do everything, this team might be too overwhelming.  No matter who comes out in front, though, it’s a win-win for the community.
4. Pandora will all but kill Last.FM.  I feel that Pandora’s similar artists algorithm is worlds better than Last.FM’s, and I’m sure others would agree.  I feel that the only things keeping them from putting Last.FM out to pasture are the community features they’re lacking.  Look for Pandora to add them this year, along with scrobbling.
5. The music labels will introduce a mixtape service.  In the absence of both Muxtape and MixWit, music labels now have an opportunity to both generate some goodwill AND some revenue in the process. This is, of course, a gamble that the labels will follow through on a good idea. A lot of you might not be holding your breath, but I think it can happen.

What do you think?  Agree or disagree with any of these? Do you have predictions of your own? Leave a comment or a link to your own predictions in the comments and, in my next post, I’ll gather everyone’s prediction posts all together. Then we’ll see how right/wrong we were at the end of 2009. :]