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Here are my predictions for 2010:

1. Badges and game mechanics – Driven by the success of foursquare and Farmville, everyone is going to want badges and game mechanics embedded in their apps. Hell, we might do it, too. Not only do well-tuned game mechanics increase engagement, it also increases user exploration and education. Of course, it's easy to do it badly, and the results are not pleasant (see: Digg's leaderboard). Josh Porter has a good post on leaderboards.
2. Social media spreads deep within organizations – This is one of the bets we're making at Postling. The idea is that representing your organization on social media sites like Twitter will spread beyond the marketing department or the corporate communications / PR department. What if your salesperson at Bergdorf Goodman or Topshop had a twitter account and could provide fashion advice or tell you about sales? What if the chef at your local gourmet restaurant shared photos on his flickr account in addition to the blog and twitter account the restaurant manager may use? What if your local car mechanic posted short videos explaining what he was fixing and how it all works while the car dealership posts news about events, sales, and recalls?
3. A brief tech bubble – I think the financial markets are going to tick up a bit (although temporarily, as consumers still have more debt than they can manage) and VCs are going to be pushing for returns since their funds have done horribly over the last decade. You'll see some M&A and a couple IPOs (Facebook, Yelp, or Zynga, anyone?) in the rush to get liquidity before the window snaps shut. Also, some smart deals made by early stage firms like First Round and USV are going to see some sizable follow-on rounds.
4. Social media content as advertising – This one might not happen until 2011, but it's starting with HuffPo and VentureHacks. Basically, social media content – created to educate and inform – is the next form of brand / display advertising. Banner ads don't work, but how about blog posts or tweets? Bloggers have known that their content builds their brand reputation for years now, but I predict in 2010 we will finally see serious ad spend shifted into content creation. Next up: social media content ad networks. Postling will be there.
5. Rise of incubators and early stage funds by giant firms - In an effort to save themselves from almost certain death thanks to the sheer size of their funds ($1 Billion) coupled with the tiny amounts of capital needed to fund internet startups (< $1 million), the big funds will shrink in half and try to invest in early stage startups. Related to #3, this means it will be easier for new startups to get funding, but many won't get the support they need because the big funds simply do not have enough time / manpower to give their full attention to each of their investments. Why? Because to satisfy their investors, they need to return a huge amount of money, and they need to invest in hundreds of early stage startups (at $500k a pop) to have a chance. Eventually the big funds will give up and either shrink down to <$200 million or turn their focus to pharma, cleantech, and other life sciences investments. 

So that's my tech and startups predictions for 2010. What are yours? 

In the last 2 years, a few different sites have implemented some very successful social designs. I’ll lay out 5 social design patterns here and then follow up with case studies in subsequent posts. These apply to sites with user-generated content where the content is the primary object.

Public Timeline

I’m starting with the public timeline because, while it’s not the sexiest thing on this list, it’s critical for new users as a solution to the cold start problem. The public timeline is the first place new users will look for new content. It’s also how they will determine if they wish to join your community – the size, the tone, the cultural-norms, and the freshness of your community is easily communicated via the public timeline. And, of course, it’s also where new users can find other interesting users, which leads me to my next pattern.

Asymmetrical Follow

This has been written about before, so I won’t say much. Asymmetrical follow means I can follow the updates of a user without their permission. They, in turn, could follow me back but it’s not required. This allows for the kind of preferential attachment characteristic of scale-free networks, and it’s scale-free networks that are primed for viral propagation. When the goal is content distribution powered by network effects, it just doesn’t matter if you actually know the person or not. All that matters is if the person if a reliable source for interesting content. This is why social networks have failed to become anything more than social networks. Remember this graph from Brad Horowitz?

Only 1% of a community are content creators

Most people’s social networks aren’t large enough to contain more than a handful of super-star content creators. I believe the average Facebook account has 300 users. 1% of that is 3 – not enough to be a valuable source of content. If you think Dunbar’s number is a more accurate group size – which I do not with regard to online communities – then you’re only left with 1 or 2 people (1% of 150 = 1.5). Yes, you can argue that Facebook has done very well for itself living off of soap-opera like content – who is dating whom, who got drunk at what party, what was she wearing?!?) but there are natural limits to that growth. Their commenting feature will help drive page views, but there isn’t a whole lot of new value being created there.

Newsfeed

Nothing shocking about this. Now that your users have gone out and followed their friends and other interesting users, their homepage should now be the newsfeed that aggregates all of that content into one place. But it’s not sufficient just to include the stream of content. You need to also show who contributed that content (and, in the case of re-blogging, the other hands it passed through). Why? Because that’s how you can evaluate the people you are following (and, with re-blogging, discover new people to follow).

Re-blogging

I’m a huge re-blogging fan. It’s the engine that drives the content diffusion through the network. The concept is simple: if someone I’m following shares something interesting, I can easily push that same interesting piece of content out to everyone who is following me while providing proper attribution. Someone who follows me can do the same, and again, and again. This is really powerful, as the people who follow me are most likely not the same as the people I follow. Re-blogging provides a transport device for great interesting content to travel through connected components of the network (which are generally much larger than your immediate social network).

Social Proof

While judging the content someone shares is a decent proxy for evaluating whether or not to follow that person, social proof can help. Show how many followers the person has. Better yet, calculate their influence (like PageRank does for websites). Or, show how many favorites their posts have accrued or re-blogs their posts have had. It’s a quick and easy way for users to ascertain the reputation of a user in the context of your site.

Bonus: APIs and RSS

I promised five, but here’s an extra. Use APIs and RSS to amplify your power. Provide APIs so that others can build tools that extend your reach. Publish RSS feeds so that users can incorporate your interesting content into their existing routines. Make use of other companies’ APIs to publish your content out to them (like publishing to Twitter). It’s very difficult to create new habits, but it’s much easier to go where your users already are (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader in my case).

Like I said at the start, I’ll be back soon with some commentary on how well (or not) various sites are implementing these ideas. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about Blip.fm, bit.ly, and Soup.io. I’d love to talk about Etsy, but I feel like it wouldn’t be appropriate.

I was chatting with my friend Dan Nelson today after bumping into him at the Cornell Music Department library. He’s currently a Ph.D student at UPenn studying musical composition. He threw an idea at me and, after some collaboration, we came up with something akin to a Flickr for composed music.

It would work like this:

Everyone who registers gets a tumblog. (Side note: I love Tumblr. I thought about apologizing to everyone who keeps hearing me implement ideas with Tumblr, but I’m not going to. They deserve it for a job well done.)

Composers will use their tumblogs to publish 2 things. One, an mp3 of their composition. Two, a PDF of the score. Composers are encouraged to tag their content for improved discovery.

Everyone can use their tumblr dashboard to follow composers they like and heart music they like. Everyone can also use their tumblogs to re-blog music they particularly like and post about their experience with the music they’ve discovered.

Like Flickr, people can search for music or composers. Like Flickr, you can explore the most interesting compositions. And most importantly, like Flickr, you can pay to have a hard copy printed, bound, and mailed directly to you.

Your market is anyone who buys sheet music – basically every school and private music teacher in the country (and internationally). Sure, some people would just print out the PDFs for free, but I bet enough schools and teachers would pay for the nicely published and bound parts and score to make a profit. Like Chris Anderson has been saying since he wrote the Long Tail, you can be successful even if only a minority of your users pay.

If successful, what we will have done is broken the pre-Internet strangehold of the major publishing houses and academic elitism on composed music, similar to what Vimeo is doing for video and Etsy is doing for handmade goods. Something I thought about when I was at Etsy that applies here is, “An audience for every artist.” We can create a forum for quality composed music with a long tail. We can use social aggregation instead of editorial fiat to discovery great music. We can empower people to try their hand at composition even if they are a one-hit-wonder.

If anyone is interested in helping Dan build this company, please contact me – david.lifson at gmail – and I’ll pass your name along. It’s super simple, engineering-wise; Tumblr’s API is free and easy to use, storing the data and metadata is easy, slap a search index on the data, and you’re done. All that would be left is to set up a business partnership with a printing company like Subito Music, and the task of getting the word out and building up a community. And really, how many startups these days come with a business model, not to mention a highly targeted audience and a trove of user preference data.

Doc Searls Weblog · The Live Web

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. The web is a medium for activities – for collaboration and participation. When I read (or hear or watch) something, I want to know who created that content. I want to respond to it (as I am now with this post). I can publish this post out to my friends via a variety of methods thanks to RSS, so that my content can go to where my friends’ are, and not forcing them to come to me.

It’s perfect that at the end of Doc Searls’ blog post he links to Umair Haque’s post called How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now. Read it. Understand it. Expand the pie for everyone.

Thanks to a Facebook Application called Friend Wheel, I can generate the visualization pictured above of my 549 Facebook friends (and still growing). It’s kinda fun to look at; my friends are listing around the edges of the circle, and a line connects to people who are also friends of each other on facebook.  The reds, oranges, and yellows are high school friends. The deep blues are Amazon.com friends. The greens and aquas and most of the rest are college friends.

I had dinner with my friend Steve McNally last night, who is roommates with my other friend Jake Tuck. Lisa asked me which one was I closer to. My response was that I had more history with Jake (we were housemates all through college, whereas Steve only lived in my house for half of college) but was probably closer to Steve since we shared a passion for baseball. Tough call, since Jake is a musician (as I am). Then Lisa asked me if they were friends with Will Paul. I said no, because Will is a hometown friend while Jake and Steve were college friends. So that got me into thinking about how to visual social networks and how inadequate two dimensions is.

Let’s try three dimensions. For the x- and y-axis, imagine an ideaspace – this is a plane that maps out the various interests people have, the hobbies they participate in, the fields they work in. So you have one circle for the friends you go to jazz concerts with, one circle for your photowalking friends, one for your baseball friends. The size of the circle is the number of mutual friends you have who share that interest. At the center, (0,0), is you. The circles in the plane are arranged such that the interests that are most passionate to you are closest to the center. Does this make sense? Two dimensional graph containing overlapping circles of various sizes, with the ones closest to center being of the most interest to you. Got it? Good.

Now for the third dimension, which is time. Over time, you will naturally transition environments. High school, college, work, living abroad, joining the local book club, marrying your spouse and meeting her friends and family, moving to the suburbs to raise a family, etc. Each of these events expands your social network and can form dense clumps. The third dimension in our visualization allows for the stacking of these clumps. It is more uncommon for connections to span the clumps, but it can happen and can be enlightening. I think seeing such a visualization would tell a lot about a person – what their interests are, who their friends are, and how have they changed over time. What’s your social network look like in three dimensions?