2010 in Review

Do ReadWriteWeb

App Stores

By Richard MacManus / November 25, 2010 4:15 PM 

The Mobile Web has been a huge trend in 2010 and one 

output of that has been the emergence of app stores. 

It started of course with Apple's App Store

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The Rise of Tumblr, Posterous & Light Blogging

By Richard MacManus / November 24, 2010 7:47 PM  

One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased 

simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it's

Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online 

buddies, or 

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Growth of eBooks & eReaders

By Richard MacManus / November 21, 2010 7:15 PM

eBook sales almost doubled over 2010 and now make 

up 9% of total consumer book sales, according to 

the Association of American Publishers. This growth 

was fueled by intense competition

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HTML5

By Richard MacManus / November 18, 2010 7:20 PM 

2010 has been a watershed year for the next version 

of HTML, the markup language that all web pages 

are written in. The reason for the emerging 

popularity of HTML5

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Content Farms

By Richard MacManus / November 17, 2010 7:30 PM 

The Web has always rewarded quantity more than 

quality, but over 2010 this truism became even 

more pronounced with the growth of Content 

Farms. These are companies which create

thousands

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Poll: Best Social Shopping Products of 2010

By Richard MacManus / November 16, 2010 7:30 PM

Yesterday we published an overview of social 

shopping in 2010, one of the year's top trends. 

Social shopping is a form of e-commerce in which 

you can share and access

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Social Shopping

By Richard MacManus / November 15, 2010 10:00 PM 

In 2010, we've seen the rise of so-called "social 

shopping" services. They rely heavily on technologies 

such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart 

phone scanners. Here we present five of

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Social Media Era Set to Peak in 2012

Do ReadWriteWeb:


Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 - according to a post by Justin Kistner, a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends. Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web "is Facebook's game to lose."

Data from Google Trends suggests that the term 'web 2.0' became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 'social media' started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009.

If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I'm inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years - for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email.

The 'news references' chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term 'social media' far more than 'web 2.0.' Partly that's because 'web 2.0' has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand ("You mean there were two Webs?"). But it undeniably also shows that the term 'social media' began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that's when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream.

Nowadays, it's hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter.

OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses - online, on TV and in the real world.

The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn't necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb's biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations.

I'm inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak.

What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one?