image credit: Optical Illusion [Flickr]
2008 was a year of tremendous ups and downs. It was also a year of bold declarations. One week a social media property would be declared the future... the next "big" thing. The next week it would be declared dead. Many platforms sought to monetize, very few of them have been successful. And with the economic condition, everyone has begun looking around and taking bets on which properties will still be around after the recession.
Today I took a look back at my (half) year in Weekly Digests to figure out what exactly happened in the past many months.
What's Been Happening This Year
The Rocky Road for Facebook and Social Networks
Facebook experienced massive growth, as everyone and their mothers decided to join the platform in 2008. But it wasn't all success. While Facebook Connect has shown great promise, advertising and app success rates dropped. Engagement Ads saw a mixed reception. There was a near revolt over the new design. And many of Facebook's announcements had people wondering if they were positioned to be the next Google or the next MySpace.
Speaking of MySpace, they seemed to have an even rougher time this year . We saw the launch of MySpace music and profile redesigns, but nothing they did could fight against the numbers. In 2008 Facebook finally matched and then exceeded MySpace in monthly traffic. Other smaller networks such as imeem were on the up and up, but then had to let much of their staff go due to the failing economy. LinkedIn continues to grow in importance and the launch of their apps platform has been well received.
What Is Recession Proof? Google, Online Video, Mobile and Twitter
I'm not claiming that any of the above are recession proof, but their story has painted a rosier picture this year than the social networks. Google and their online video mammoth YouTube had some healthy news this year (let's just forget about Lively for a minute). More telling than anything, nothing became the next Google, especially not Cuil. Instead, Google's launches, such as Android and Chrome, are expected to grow 2009.
YouTube went widescreen, saw traffic boosts during the election, and added more monetization options via embed ads and sponsored videos. And let's not forget that President-Elect Obama has used it as his video platform of choice for his weekly addresses to the public. YouTube wasn't the only online video success story this year. Hulu has continued to gain huge traffic numbers, probably helped quite a bit by all those Tina Fey as Sarah Palin videos.
2008 wasn't really the year of embracing open standards and data portability (hopefully 2009 will be). And 2008 wasn't really the year of mobile domination, where America catches up to the rest of the world. But, it's hard to argue that mobile didn't have an exciting year. You just have to look at the iPhone 2.0 launch and millions of dollars spent at the app store on games, ocarinas, and beer applications. Mobile social networking is on the rise. And while Android came out later than expected, its story will only get more interesting in 2009.
And finally, there was Twitter. 2008 was not the year it went mainstream, 2009 probably won't be either, so then why do us bloggers still talk about it so damn much? We hit 1 billion tweets this year. Twitter added continuous dialogue to the election and brought us on the ground citizen journalism on everything from earthquakes and fires to terrorist attacks and planes exploding. Twitter might never go mainstream, but I don't think it's going away any time soon.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to digesting more for you in 2009.
Marta Strickland
in
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