Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Richard MacManus, over on Read/WriteWeb has an extremely comprehensive must read post on his forecast for what will be hot in 2007.

His predictions for 2007:
RSS will go mainstream
Structured data will be a big trend
Widgets will continue rising in 2007
Web Office will continue to ramp up
The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT
Rich Internet Apps will be a major force
Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps
Semantic Web products will come of age
Expect more big things from Amazon
Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market
Watch out for developments in 2007 along the lines of a better, more robust online ad model
2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines
Microsoft’s Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year
Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS
Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in ’07
Expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense
Expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007
Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007
2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P
SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking
Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we’re seeing more of it now – SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.
The online real estate market will grow rapidly in ’07
The search for disruptive business models will continue!
Social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur
International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media
One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers
Broadband continues to grow
VoIP space will really hot up
Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007
Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in ’07
watch for an emerging Webphone market – for example Apple’s rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.

Check out Richard’s post for an explanation of each of these predictions.