It may be an obvious post to start the year, but the blogosphere loves trend stories. While the Economist focuses on how access to the internet will change over the next 12 months, and the BBC talks in hypotheticals and general trends, the consumer tech blogs get into the nitty gritty of specific predictions for 2008.
Crave picks out software that’s ready for mainstream pick-up in 2008, including the impressive social media browser Flock; The Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson puts forward some ideas on the next Facebook, among which is video diary site Seesmic. Jeremy Toeman highlights potential news stories for the year, including an interesting prediction that a “major lawsuit occurs between a carrier and either a cable company or a broadcaster, all about mobile video rights.”
The team at ReadWriteWeb suggests a number of acquisitions including Web 2.0 mainstays Digg, Tumblr, Twitter; while Adam Ostrow at Mashable looks at how 2007’s trends will translate into deals and how the evolution of technologies such as Google’s much-hyped ”Android” mobile platform will spur the growth of mobile social networking.
Meanwhile, Small Biz Labs has created a consensus of predictions for the year to come, where its easy to see that the excitement and innovation that drove the industry over the last year is not fading, and that consumers are eagerly awaiting the web’s “next big thing”, whatever it might be.
