The 5-Year Plan for Social Media
You hear this question all the time – “What’s your five-year plan?” 
It seems pretty silly to me to predict now what’s going to happen years down the line. But it is definitely acceptable to ask people about their futures in that way.
So I got to thinking, what does the Five-Year Plan for social media look like.
Checking back to 2004, MySpace was all the rage, Facebook was on a small percentage of college campuses, Friendster was sputtering along, illegal music file sharing was on the downswing and watching movies online was a growing fad. “Blog” was definitely a buzzword, but microblogging hadn’t been uttered once yet. (I think.) Blackberries were out there and AOL IM was huge.
But flash forward to 2009 and the world is a much different place. IMs have been replaced by SMS. SEO is a huge business. MySpace is off the relevancy map. Facebook now has users of every age. YouTube hosts millions of videos. Blackberries and iPhones aren’t status symbols, they are a basic necessity. Social Media is part of the fabric of our society, and it goes everywhere we do. Illegal music downloads have been replaced, for the most part, with iTunes. Life is lived on-demand. Hell, most cable companies basically give you DVR sets as part of mid-level packages so you can timeshift TV.
So from where we’ve been to where we are…where the heck are we going?
With Friendster virtually dead and MySpace struggling to hang on, how long will Facebook last? Or is it here to stay? What about Twitter? I’m fully convinced that microblogging as a concept is here to stay, but will Twitter reap the benefits? How much more connected can we be?
So the gauntlet is thrown…the year is 2014…what does social media look like?
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