A guest post by Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.
As we look forward to a brand new year, I’m sure the burning question on everyone’s lips is – what’s going to happen to microblogging in 2010? In a year that saw Ashton Kutcher reach 1 million followers on Twitter and MSN launch their own microblogging service (and MSN China clone Plurk – Dan), the next year certainly has a lot to live up to. Here, I offer a few of my own predictions for microblogging in 2010, with Dan’s thoughts below.

Increased use in organisations

I’m talking here about internal use of microblogging, as a way for colleagues to collaborate and communicate with each other. We’ve seen Google Wave emerge as a tool for professional, organisational use and I think this is the path that microblogging will take in 2010. I’ve already written on here about my thoughts on Yammer (which I still stand by) and I think we will see microblogging tools play a bigger role in internal corporate communications, as an easy and efficient way to communicate with each other. The benefits of realtime will be no more paramount than for businesses.

Dan: Totally agree, although I’m not sure I’d pick Yammer out as the key product in this area – the move is towards integrating microblogging as part of a collaborative and project management toolset – e.g. Salesforce Chatter. The novelty of an ‘internal Twitter’ is fine, but doesn’t convert those who don’t like Twitter, or those happy to DM via Twitter already. Integrated tools give reasons for people to get involved.

Twitter Declining

I won’t be the first, or last, person to say this but I think Twitter may have reached its height of popularity and I think numbers will start to dwindle, albeit slowly. The love affair with Twitter has been exciting, but it might just be over. The avalanche of spam accounts has a part to play here, but I think that when Twitter reaches its highest point of saturation, is conversely when you start to lose value in the site. It has become incredibly noisy and I am beginning to question the real use of it.

Dan: I agree to some extent. I think some of the expansion already has been down to a huge number of spam accounts, and it’s something Twitter has started to tackle, but will always be a huge problem. The lesson here is to learn from the most popular 3rd party apps – Tweetdeck and Seesmic for example, which allow far better filtering than Twitter itself. The noise levels don’t bother me too much because I’m fairly selective about who I follow (Hard to believe when I’m following almost 2k people!)

Microblogging as customer service

I think that more and more companies will embrace microblogging in 2010, beyond the extent we’re seeing now. Businesses will realise the potential of microblogging as a customer service platform though, rather than a place for sexy social media campaigns. I don’t think there will be many more hashtag competitions, we’ve had pretty much every variation of these! I hope that more companies will realise the value of microblogging to source and, most importantly, solve issues for customers. As consumers, we are expecting everything to be solved in real-time and this is what we’ll expect businesses to cater to. The power of crowdsourcing will also be recognised more and we’ll see more companies opening up product development to the masses.

Dan: Totally agree that almost every company should be using Twitter as an integral part of overall improvements to customer service. I expect to reach any tech company via Twitter, and those that do have an active role tend to respond quickly and get my repeat business!

No to video microblogging

It’s not an area that’s really taken off and I don’t think 2010 will be the year for video microblogging. Some sites have made a good attempt, such as Vidly, but once the initial shine wears off the uptake is slow. I simply don’t think that microblogging lends itself to video. A quick text update is one thing : shooting, uploading and tagging a short video is another. We’re still not as comfortable in front of the camera as we are in front of the keyboard and I don’t think this will change any time soon.

Dan: Damn it – this is an area that comes back to haunt me after I made a prediction on video at a conference that Seesmic’s original video blogging platform would take off in 2009. And I was wrong for exactly the reasons above. I’d say for the over 20s, audio blogging such as Audioboo is more accessible. However, I think there’s a huge group of teenagers who are very accustomed to broadcasting themselves on Justin.tv and Ustream. If someone taps into that market and can lure them away from sites which are heavily integrating with Facebook, Twitter etc, then we may see video microblogging take off in a couple of years. It’s also likely to be primarily mobile, and the odds are people will still video other people rather than themselves…

Location –based microblogging

If Twitter is to continue growing in 2010, I think the answer could be in location-based services. As mobile internet usage rapidly increases, we’re all going to be using location services more. If we can make real connections on Twitter with those that are physically close to us, as a more integrated part of the whole microblogging experience, this could prove incredibly popular. Integrating tweets at real-world events such as concerts and sport events will also become more popular, bringing people physically together.

Dan: Totally. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more integration between location, microblogging and special offers, but that’s definitely going to arrive this year – look at mobile social location games like Foursquare, or Google stepping up their location-based efforts. And events are a huge influence on bringing people together on Twitter – the FA Cup, the Superbowl, Eurovision etc as examples…

Integration with sites

As more people will be moving away from Twitter itself, I think microblogging will play a bigger part in existing sites. The new redesign of LinkedIn sees the now familiar stream of status updates with more prominence and I think this is probably the way many sites will go, including email services, encouraging even further interaction between people through short updates. As we become increasingly productive online in 2010, we’ll expect the microblogging functionality to feature more heavily in sites we’re already visiting, than having to go to a separate site.

Dan: Twitter, Facebook and Google are the three services that you should expect to seemlessly be integrated into almost every site you visit in the next 6 months. Each one is becoming very close to the single unified ID many people have talked about…

Microblogging in 2010 – what do you think?

In amongst the turmoil of #iranelection, and the news that Twitter is starting to moderate trending topics, it’s nice to finish the week on a more humourous note.

Which is why I’m chuckling to myself about the huge number of current ReTweets:

‘Worst Daily Mail poll ever. VOTE YES to skew the results and pass it on! http://bit.ly/w4b6Q’

As of 2pm on Friday, it’s flooding the place.

And the reason for all this is the conservative right UK newspaper, The Daily Mail, whose poll of the day really does defy belief:  ‘Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?’

And the effect of Twitter probably explains why the poll is currently skewed to 85% Yes, and 15% No.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

It feels weird to publish a post effectively blowing our own trumpets, but this was too good not to share. A quick look around for other interesting sites covering microblogging revealed 140char.com is the #1 return for a Google search for ‘microblogging blog’.

Wahey!

That would be the almighty Wikipedia below us!

To justify the post a bit more, I did a quick bit of playing around for the following searches:

‘microblogging blog’ 1,250,000 results.

‘twitter blog’ 41,600,000 results. (And we’re nowhere near as high!)

‘jaiku blog’ 3,830,000 results.

‘pownce blog’ 2,570,000 results.

‘plurk blog’ 2,460,000 results.

‘identi.ca blog’ 392,000 results.

‘yammer blog’ 258,000 results.

A quick look at Google Trends echoes these results. I won’t embed the graph because Twitter skews it so far that everything else is just a blurred line at the bottom.

However:

It’ll be interesting to see whether open source microblogging and services which can be manually deployed behind the corporate firewall is demanded as much as enterprise options set-up and hosted by a third party. I suspect the current data is skewed somewhat by the mentions of Yammer winning the TechCrunch 50!