A little something I rustled up for Mumbai Mirror’s New Year’s issue. Unedited, uncensored and hopefully, better formatted than the print edition.
The problem with writing a column about the web trends of 2012 is that I can’t exactly prophesies about flying cars, giant robots or alien visitations. Reason being, change on the internet is a little less dramatic (and less cliched) but as important all the same.
2011 has been its growing up year of sorts. From Egypt to Russia along with pitstops along the UK, US and to an extent India, you’d have to be living under a rock not to take notice of the role Twitter and Facebook have played in advocating governmental change.
While this doesn’t mean that we’d stop using social media to document drunken nights of debauchery, it just means the methods of doing so will change. Here’s my predictions for 2012′s internet trends.
1. Social media goes visual: rather than fill in your Facebook or Twitter status updates with random song quotes or banal whining about how crowded the local train was, video and photo uploads allow you those few moments to think “is this really worth sharing?”. Throw in the fact that your average cellphone camera is competent to film and shoot with ease, and that images speak louder than 140 characters, you get fledgling networks like Instagram ( a photo app currently for iOS devices only but heading to Android phones soon) and Viddy (a video editing and sharing app for smartphones) primed to steal a slice of Facebook’s and Twitters social pie.
2. Year of the mobile. For real: every year seems to the be the year when mobile internet takes off. 2012 is one of them. But what makes us believe it will finally happen? For starters smartphone prices are next to nothing, social apps like Facebook and Google Plus are now mobile in a big way and hardware manufacturers such as Nokia are pushing Near Field Communication to allow for contactless payments too. So you’d be using your phone for more than just Whatsapp or Angry Birds. Oh and the occasional call. Now if they’d just lower iPhone 4S prices…
3. Anonymity becomes a hot-button topic: Be it what movies you’re watching or where you are shopping, a lot of what you do in real life finds its way on the internet. If you don’t share, your friends will. It’s this always connected, always sharing system of social media that leads to privacy concerns. This is made worse by the fact that all your information is archived, making it easy to find at any given time. For example, the last thing a prospective job candidate would want, is a recruiter to chance upon his or her not so printable thoughts on Sunny Leone on Bigg Boss. On a more serious note, anonymity allows users to speak up without fear and gives whistleblowers much needed protection. The point is, as more people are aware of the importance for anonymity, it opens up an avenue to charge for it rather than leave you without a choice. Don’t be surprised if Facebook and Google Plus offer that option in 2012.
So there you have it, three of the bigger internet trends for the new year which promises to be more agile, vibrant and effervescent than the last.
