On January 1, 2009, on my now-retired technology blog, I made a series of 10 predictions about what 2009 would bring to the realm of social media.  Although I am not currently writing about tech, I continue to follow the field very closely, and it turns out that some of my predictions were not so far off.  Since a yearly tradition is meaningless unless it’s followed up on, let’s take a look at these 10 predictions and see how far off I really was.

1. A high profile crime, or intended crime, will renew focus on social media’s privacy controls.  Thankfully, the last 12 months didn’t bring any serious incidents, but privacy has definitely become a larger focus.  Passwords, email accounts, and other personal information aren’t as private as we thought they would be, and the recent privacy changes on #1 website Facebook have resulted in an increased focus on privacy for even the casual user.  We are definitely not headed in the right direction when it comes to protecting our sensitive data.
2. Large social sites will continue to grow as others peter out.  Although this was a pretty safe prediction, 2009’s shaky economic changes put many of my favorite sites, such as Swurl and Kakuteru, to bed– permanently.  This was a bad year to offer a new service.
3. Flickr will find itself in serious trouble.  Glad to see this one isn’t the case!  Hunch, the new service by Caterina Fake, Flickr co-founder, seems to be doing okay, but aside from lack of obvious innovation, Flickr seems to be around to stay.  I would love to see some numbers on how Facebook’s growing photo application has eaten into the site’s business, though…
4. FriendFeed will die.  Although it didn’t happen in the way I expected, Facebook’s buyout of 2008 wonder child FriendFeed definitely gutted the site of both users and spark.  A slow-down in realtime updating was almost the death knell for the site, it seemed, but everything’s back on track over there– for now.  Much like after the demise of the Pownce community, beleaguered FriendFeeders have had to move elsewhere.
5. Universal blog commenting services will be unified under WordPress. Not so much the case, although ECHO (née JS-Kit) has made some recent and solid strides in providing some sort of chatter unification.  This is definitely worth keeping an eye on as conversation is even more fragmented at the end of the year as it was at the beginning.
6. Facebook connect will take off.  Not really.  It’s definitely dealt a solid blow to Google Friend Connect, as evidenced by Google’s recent turn to Twitter for assistance, but we’ve yet to see this technology being used to its full potential.  Don’t worry– it’ll happen in 2010.
7. Facebook will continue to succeed in mobile social networking.  Facebook 3.0 for iPhone might be the best iPhone application out there, for sure, but when lead app developer Joe Hewitt quit the project in a highly publicized move, it made the future of Facebook on iPhone considerably less certain.  Where once we were begging for push notifications, we’ll now be lucky to see a 4.0 at all.
8. The iPhone will continue to be the gadget of 2009.  Definitely the case, I think.  Even the best efforts of other phones, such as the Palm Pre, Android, and Droid, haven’t really provided a challenge to the king of the devices.  If you don’t have an iPhone yet, get one if a new one is released this summer!
9. SixApart will continue to suck.  Haven’t heard of much they’ve been up to recently, so it seems this is pretty reasonably the case.
10. Social networks will see a decline in usage, in general.  Networks are more popular than they ever have been, so I’m comfortable saying this one is pretty far off.  I do envision an oncoming social networking fatigue, though, so we’ll have to see what the future holds.

Agree or disagree with this analysis?  Feel free to let me know in the comments.  I’d love to hear your predictions for 2010, too, in case I don’t get a chance to come up with my own this year.

As the Fall 2009 semester picks up speed, I have officially joined the Roediger Memory Lab in the Brain, Behavior & Cognition program here at Washington University.  You can read a little more about the work I have in progress on my Research page.

St. Louis and Washington University have been a big change of pace, but I am excited and privileged to be starting a research program in the company of true current and future scholars.

May 23, 2009 marked my last day as an undergraduate student of the College of William & Mary.  I now join the ranks of proud Tribe alumni as I turn to the next chapter in my academic career: graduate study at Washington University in St. Louis.  Good bye, East Coast; hello, Midwest!

At 12:00pm today, I successfully defended my honors thesis entitled, “Eye Movements While Zoning Out During Reading: Implications for Mind Wandering and Metaconsciousness.”  Here are the slides that I presented to thesis committee members Christopher Ball, Peter Vishton, and Noah Schwartz.

I am pleased to share that the panel elected to award High Honors to this research.

A draft of this research is available in PDF and Microsoft Word formats for personal use.

If you’re a longtime visitor to andydesoto.com, you might be looking for the technology blog that used to inhabit these pages.  The site has been archived at technimentis.com.

Why the move?  The andydesoto.com domain was just too important not to be associated with my career as a graduate student.

Sorry for the confusion!