Google+ Rises – Google, the company that made its fortune in search, will figure out that G+ isn’t a social network, it’s a content directory. Google+’s best chance at success lies in its bread and butter – SEO – by giving big brands, celebrities and other entities the opportunity to dictate organic search. Look for Google to start showcasing G+ content in organic search results. It’s already starting to happen; expect more of it in 2013.

Snapchat Gets More Buzz – Snapchat, a messaging service seemingly inspired by Inspector Gadget with its self-destructing (sort of, but not really) messages, photos and videos, will go mainstream. It’s just starting to pick up buzz and the teenage demographic. Parents are no longer in the dark about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but how many know that their kids are on Snapchat? After all, teenagers are always looking for loopholes, so if you tell them they can’t use Instagram, they’ll just go somewhere else. For now, Snapchat seems to be that destination.

MySpace never really takes off – Tom may be sitting on his $580 million while you slave away hoping for another half day off, and Justin Timberlake may have signed on to be the new face of the old social network, but so far, there’s no evidence that every day users have interest in reclaiming their old space on the new Myspace. I’m not holding my breath. Besides, I always liked Friendster better back in the day.

Facebook and Twitter continue aggressive monetization push – Facebook changes the rules of engagement on a weekly basis, and they’re guaranteed to continue to seek out more revenue channels. Now a billion users strong, Facebook has gotten very aggressive about monetization, looking to charge fan pages anywhere from $2-25,000 for millions guaranteed impressions from, get this, their own audience! In December 2010, I predicted in this space that Facebook would charge brands in 2011. Looks like I was ahead of the curve at the time. But it was inevitable. As for Twitter, look for them to follow suit, and look for more tweets from people you never followed popping up in your timeline.

Social Networks Continue to Sell Your Data and Content – Most of us will continue to agree to the Terms of Service without thinking. But no worries, that picture you took of your lunch isn’t valuable anyway. But your data, what you like, and your user behaviors are likely all up for grabs.

Here Come the Commercials – With DVRs and On Demand neutralizing commercials on television, look for advertisers to seek out targeted video ad placements on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Social Media Gurus Go Out of Business – As Corporate America continues to staff up to manage social media internally, it will continue to realize that the only thing many outside social media consultants are actually selling is unquantifiable “engagement,” not to mention their own books. Those who refuse to measure ROI (with ridiculous justifications like, “What’s the ROI of your mother?”) or generate tangible results will be out of business. I think we’ll see more and more of the self-promoting, self-proclaimed “gurus” running for the comforts of a steady paycheck with a full-time job in Corporate America.

Journalism Continues to Die – As the gap that separates professional journalists from citizens narrows and the race to be first with a story intensifies, you’ll see more shoddy reporting from professional news outlets. This trend is well underway, but as traditional media relies more upon gathering information from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, the quality of reporting will continue its steady erosion.

The Daily Deals Industry Finally Dies – Either Groupon, Living Social or both will go out of business this year. There’s a million stories out there about Groupon “deals” putting restaurants out of business. It will finally come back to haunt them and the shoe will land on the other foot. Remember when they turned down a $6 billion dollar offer from Google? Who was dumber? Google for offering, or Groupon for turning it down?

1,000 More Bad Ideas Emerge – They’ll be easier to spot this year. Let’s face it, for every Pinterest, there’s 40 startups out their trying to be Pinterest-meets-Tumblr-meets-Instagram. Trust me. They’re all horrible ideas.

To test it out, I quickly generated a month’s worth of data about the Celtics two primary promoted hashtags, “#iamaceltic” and “#celticschat“. #iamaceltic is used mostly in a marketing capacity, and we’ve put it everywhere from TV commercials to T-shits. #celticschat, on the other hand, is a utility hashtag, used to track the conversation around our games when the team is playing, and then captured on Celtics.com’s GameTime Live game tracking application. We’ve promoted the #celticschat tag in-game during broadcasts on Comcast SportsNet New England this season.

I’m not quite clear on how accurate this data is, or if it is generated with Firehouse access to Twitter, but regardless, here’s what it generated for our two tags. And as you can see below, there’s some missing data, so it’s unclear how stable the visual.ly platform is on the whole. Still, it’s a pretty interesting tool.

#iamaceltic

#celticschat

The day a Klout score prevents me from getting approved for a mortgage or car loan, I’ll be inclined to agree. I’m confident that day is not coming.

I’ve never been a believer in Klout, the service that claims to measure your online influence by assigning a 1-100 score based on your activity across multiple social networks. For many reasons, their system is incredibly flawed, even as they’ve continued to tweak their secret sauce formula for evaluating influence. Their constant tinkering has resulted in drastic score adjustments seemingly without reason, and Klout often concludes that you’re influential about nonsensical topics about which you’ve never discussed.

Klout assigns a score to twitter handles in an attempt to measure people’s influence across the social media landscape.

While I’m glad someone’s trying to measure and quantify online activity, I think Klout is way off, even when it comes to two of their top ranking profiles, @BarackObama (91) and @JustinBieber (100). For instance, how in the world is @BarackObama influential about Drone Music and Homebrewing? Or, for that matter, even Fascism? And in what universe is Justin Bieber an informed commentator concerning Adolf Hitler or the Holocaust? Klout made all of these claims on Sunday, February 19 when I looked up two of their highest-ranking accounts.

Currently, Klout thinks “Gym” and “College” are among the topics about which I’m allegedly influential, despite the fact that I can’t remember ever tweeting about a workout or academics. The closest thing I can recall mentioning would be a joke about a Shake Weight ad.

I’ve criticized Klout for their misrepresentation of influence on numerous occasions, but they’ve yet to fix the problem. Clearly their system is inherently flawed. But with that said, after watching this interview with Denise Blasevick (@AdvertGirl) on MSNBC where she explains how to use Klout to a reporter, maybe there is some value to keeping an eye on the service.

Denise isn’t caught up in her Klout score either, but she does see value in monitoring the topics about which Klout thinks she’s influential, even if the service is dead wrong.

Her point is important, because if Klout says you’re influential about dogs, uninformed strangers would have no reason to believe it’s untrue. So from the standpoint of brand management alone, you should probably keep tabs on Klout’s perception of your social media activity. And if nothing else, it may help you keep track of the topics about which you actually are tweeting.

“If I want to be influential about something in my industry – if I have a Green roofing company – then I want to make sure I’m tweeting about things that are helpful in that industry and then people will see me as an expert,” Blasevick told MSNBC in the interview posted above via YouTube.

She also point out that Klout is an effective way for small business owners to connect with niche tweeters and keep tabs on the competition, as it ranks its top 10 tweeters by topic over the trailing 90 days.

It won’t be valuable for tracking influencers in broad topics like “social media” – it shows you the same 10 people you’ve already heard of – but for something more specific like Cosmetics, it could be a resource to connect with online thought leaders in the space.

Overall, I still don’t put much clout in Klout, but Blasevick’s outlook made me take a second look. It’s probably worth keeping an eye on, but I’m not losing any sleep over Klout’s claims about my influence, good, bad or otherwise.

The following Q&A was conducted by Paul M. Banks (@Paul_M_BanksTSB) for ChicagoNow.com and was published on October 26, 2011.

Congrats on keeping the Celtics site within the top 5 most trafficked (among NBA sites), what’s the key to that success?

Stringer: When I first joined the Celtics in 2005, our team was not a championship caliber squad on the court, yet Celtics.com was typically ranked in the top 10 NBA websites. Having a brand with 60 years of history, and now 17 championships, means that fan interest will always be strong.

That said, when I took the job, I made the decision to change our emphasis to content and started covering the team myself, something Celtics.com wasn’t doing at the time. Most teams weren’t doing it either. But I think that decision paid off and gave fans a reason to come to us for regular content about the team.

In ’05-’06, we really started delivering content, news and information to our website as soon as we could post it, and we were routinely beating the local papers with team information. It forced them to adjust, and they initially weren’t happy about it. Six years later, Twitter has taken that 10 steps further. Sports journalism has evolved drastically since I started with the team.

So true. Sports media has changed so much in even the past 2-3 years, the last 5 even more so. How has the 2008 NBA championship provided long term benefits for your organization’s: online presence, social media presence, ability to market offline, size of fanbase? What percentages of growth have you seen?

Stringer: There’s no question that winning the NBA title in 2008 gave us a huge boost in terms of fan interest. We had our biggest season ever on Celtics.com in terms of traffic in 2010-11, and yet we only went two rounds deep in the NBA Playoffs. That said, before last year, traffic was trending downward, yet our social media audience was exploding. The reality is, fans are spending less time seeking out team websites and spend more time following your team via social media. So we need to be constantly providing news and information to fans on Facebook and Twitter because that’s where they’re spending and increasing amount of their time online.

Beyond Twitter and Facebook, what are your most useful/favorite social media sites. What do you find to be the best/worst aspects of: Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious, Reddit

Stringer: I use Twitter as my own content curator to find things I’m interested in, and almost never use any of those other sites you mentioned here. Twitter always turns up great content for me, and I rarely go to ESPN.com or other websites anymore. I go to Twitter to seek out content from my peers and industry leaders, and I make an effort to share content that I think my own personal followers will find compelling. That’s why Twitter is so important to me. It’s completely reinvented how most of us are consuming information.

Couldn’t agree more, Twitter is really the only one I use, and I check it like 10-12 times a day.

What’s your best advice to the web entrepreneur that seeks to use social media mostly to build traffic, not to build online relationships? Just posting links to the site isn’t an advisable practice is it?

Stringer: You can’t expect social media to deliver huge traffic numbers to a website, and if your economic model is based around page views, it’s time to rethink it. People want headlines first and foremost, and rarely want to click and read. Unless you’re the first to provide some exciting breaking news or unique content, you’re not going to see click-throughs beyond 2-3% on a regular basis. We’re in the age of skimming right now; attention spans are getting shorter all the time.

I still enjoy reading and find plenty of great content on Twitter, but social media is not going to instantly deliver traffic to your website. You have to develop a pattern of delivering quality content on a regular basis, and should be working on creating ways to monetize your growing social audience because your website traffic will almost certainly drop if isn’t already.

You do a lot of public speaking, what are some of the hottest topics of NBA discussion right now?

Stringer: Every time I speak about the Celtics’ social media efforts, I always get asked about generating ROI in social media. It’s the number one question on people’s mind. It’s something I spend a lot of time working on as well.

What are the basic requirements for any web company’s Social Media Strategy and Social Media Marketing plan?

Stringer: First things first: Have a strategy. Far too many companies are doing social but can’t articulate a basic strategy. And second, I’d say you need to be constantly reading and learning about it, because this business is quickly evolving. Companies like Facebook are changing the rules constantly. What was true in social media last week may not be true next week. It’s your responsibility to stay current, and I spend a lot of time keeping up with the industry.

What would you change/add to that answer in regards to Sports Marketing and Sports Brand Management?

Stringer: I’d say that sports marketing and branding is increasingly becoming a technology issue. We reach millions more fans in the digital arena than we’ll ever reach in the physical arena. So teams need to invest a lot more time, energy and strategy in digital as they look to market their team to fans all over the globe for the long term.

Tell us what SES attendees should expect during your panel session ”Social Media and Sports” with Scott Reifert, Bryan Srabian and Jamie Trecker.

Stringer: I’m looking forward to the panel. I met Bryan a few months back in San Francisco when I was in town, and I’m looking forward to connecting with Scott and Jamie as well. While I’m sure we won’t agree on everything, it’s always great to exchange ideas about this stuff, and it should be a great discussion. We’ve all had unique experiences with large sports brands in great sports cities, so we’ll all be bringing informed perspectives to the table.

Finally, athletes tweeting: pros and cons?

Stringer: What did Spiderman’s uncle say? “With great power comes great responsibility.” Athletes have a unique opportunity to connect with fans on their own time and in their own way with social media, but the pitfalls are dangerous and they’re inevitably going to make mistakes.

At this point, you’d think they’d realize that anything they tweet is fair game, but it seems like every week athletes are re-learning this lesson. We live in a new age of transparency, and the walls that used to separate the star athlete from a common fan are quickly falling down. Used correctly, social media can be a great tool for athletes. But it’s very easy for them to make a damaging mistake if they don’t take it seriously.

A large raise.

I can’t give you a figure that tells me what each of the Boston Celtics’ 5.5 million Facebook fans is worth, and honestly, if you’re trying to write an algorithm that will answer the question, you’re wasting your time.

Becoming a Facebook fan takes one click of the button. It’s not a commitment of time, energy or money. Not all Facebook fans are created equally. Some will complain you don’t post enough. Others will unlike you once you start bombarding their News Feed with updates. And most will never even see your brilliant status updates thanks to Edge Rank, the formula Facebook uses to determine exactly what makes it to your News Feed in the first place.

Multiple studies suggest that most Facebook fans never return to your Fan Page after they’ve “Liked” your brand. I’d argue many of them probably never even made it to your page at all. According to our Facebook Insights data, last month, only 13 percent of our new Facebook fans liked the Celtics from our Fan Page or a shared News Feed update. Seventy-three percent liked us from their own profile (organically, while filling out their interests) or saw our logo on a friend’s profile and hit “Like” there.

The point is, your fans are coming in from many different angles. But profiles tend to be the leading source of “Likes”, so who likes you already has a large impact on who will to decide to “Like” you today and tomorrow. So a Like from a celebrity’s page or another brand itself is probably far more valuable than one from Joe Schmo.

So what’s the true value of a Facebook fan? Here’s a better question: What’s the lifetime value of a fan in your marketing database? How much will they spend on your products? You probably already have a metric for those database questions, and frankly, I think those are far more informative and important ROI metrics.

Still, since Facebook is the newest toy on the shelf, brands and their CMOs are more focused counting “Likes”, because it’s an easy comparative metric. But digital marketers should really be focusing their energy on collecting demographic data from their Facebook fan base, regardless of its size.

What data can you glean? Insights is a good start if you haven’t already looked, but it only tells part of the story. If you want some quick feedback, try posting a Facebook question to your fan base. If you want a more robust dataset, set up a Survey Monkey account, give your fans an incentive to fill out the form, and compose a survey they can complete in 5-10 minutes.

If you need still more data, you can go through the process of buying a Facebook ad, and start targeting your potential ad with various parameters, and Facebook will give you a real-time estimate of how many fans you reach. Make sure you’re sorting by fans who are already fans of your brand. You don’t have to actually buy that ad, but the targeting process is a quick and dirty way to figure out things like where your Facebook fans live, or get a percentage of their marital status. It’s not exact, and it’s a little clunky, but with a bit of digging you can unearth some advanced metrics that Insights doesn’t currently provide.

Finally, there are a few vendors out there who are working on aggregating data from multiple fan pages, and may be able to help you get a better picture of your overall Facebook audience.

Rather than worrying about the size of your fan page, or the value of a Facebook fan, why not spend some time learning about that fan base instead? In digital marketing, a little data goes a long way.

This piece originally appeared as a guest blog for the Social Media Club on November 4, 2011.

I just returned from the Media Post Social Media Insiders Summit (check hashtag #MPSMIS on Twitter for complete coverage) and was pleasantly surprised by the quality and depth of content, the format for the event, and sharp and personable people I met over the course of the last three days in Key Biscayne, Florida.

The tropical setting didn’t hurt — especially considering the blizzard back home in Boston that I dodged — and I found this to be the most enjoyable conference I’ve ever attended. Resort quality amenities at the Ritz Carlton made things comfortable, but most importantly, the discussions, panels and roundtables were on topic, and well thought out.

I had the pleasure of leading a roundtable discussion entitled, “Seriously, Do Consumers Like Being Targeted?”, where we talked about everything from what Google knows about you to email segmenting and everything in between. At times it veered off topic, but I erred on the side of letting the conversation flow and keeping everyone involved, and I think everyone who participated walked away smarter for it.

Even the lunchtime sponsor presentations, which at most conferences are brutal sales pitches traded for a dry meal, were far more geared toward providing information, value and analysis than they were aimed at pimping out their services. And the food was top drawer to boot.

Representing a pretty unique and well-known brand myself, I had prepared to be accosted by vendors and sales guys at every turn. And sure, I exchanged a bunch of business cards, picked up plenty of Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections, but there was far more of a networking vibe than I might have expected. Maybe the onslaught is yet to come, but I feel like I made some very valuable connections with some of the smartest people working in the social media space today.

No conference is ever perfectly executed. The #MPSMIS hashtag wasn’t well publicized (although it did catch on by the end of Day 1), and there were no breaks between presentations and panels, which left you with no choice but to walk out mid-presentation for a bathroom break or just some fresh air. A few presenters need to work on their Power Point skills (littering slides with small text doesn’t work in big room) but that’s a minor complaint.

Over three days, topics like data privacy, Facebook advertising, social commerce, user generated content, Twitter analytics, location-based services/check-ins, “engagement” (by far the most overused bailout buzzword of the conference), Mommy Bloggers and niche social networks were all covered in-depth. I tweeted out over 50 notes, quotes, stats and observations and could have easily doubled that if I wasn’t worried about overwhelming people’s timelines.

All in all, it was a solid experience and perhaps the best conference I’ve been to date. I hope to return to next year’s Social Media Insiders Summit.

Shades of gray be damned in the world of Twitter!

Much like text messages, tweets are often misinterpreted or straight up misunderstood. There’s definitely an art to getting your message across while preventing your readers from misconstruing the meaning. Still, people like opinions, and fence-sitting is not the way to build a following. There’s significant pressure to make your point and sound like an expert. Occasionally, the true meaning becomes the collateral damage.

With all of that in mind, some tweets beg more explanation, so I’m thinking it makes sense to footnote some recent tweets after the fact. Here’s my first stab at it…

• According to @syncapse, at $136/fan, @Celtics FB fanbase (2.7 MM) is worth $375 million. Asking 4 commission on Monday.

Numbers like this always make me laugh. At what point does $136 dollars a fan make sense? If I open a fan page tomorrow and pick up 20 fans, does $136 hold true? Does that $375 million number for the Celtics make any sense?

While it’s great that people are trying to attach some ROI to acquiring Facebook fans, it seems silly to attach such a crazy number to it. And at the end of the day, if you don’t activate them, get them to do something, buy something or promote something, are they really worth anything at all?

• 77 people have checked in at TD Garden on Foursquare tonight. Capacity is 18,624. That’s < 0.5%. I continue to be underwhelmed by 4sq.

I tried Foursquare for two weeks last winter. Maybe I don’t get out enough. Or maybe I don’t care to broadcast my whereabouts. Or maybe I just don’t care. Whatever the reason, a year later, I just don’t think location-based social networks and check-in technologies will ever really take off.

I mean, I’m basically a social media dork, and if I don’t care, why would the average person, or the cool person, or the too-cool-for-school types? For any technology or trend to reach critical mass, it needs to have transcendent appeal. Foursquare, Gowalla and friends just don’t have it as far as I’m concerned. Ditto for Quora, which probably would get zero traction if not for its clever leveraging Twitter for growing its user base.

But when less than 0.5% of our crowd bothers to check-in at the Garden on a game night, that tells me that people don’t care. Could we get more check-ins if we blasted people on the jumbotron and asked them to do it? Sure. Would there be any value in it for us? I doubt it.

If anything, we’d just have to offer a discount to fans to get them to do it. That costs us money, and it’s not likely to drive any new business. These fans are already at the game. Is a 15% discount of a hot dog and a soda or a Rondo jersey in the pro shop for 77 people really going to drive any significant ROI? Especially when we could be using that in-game at bat with our fans to promote something more lucrative? Unlikely.

That said, what follows is a much more interesting after the fact “check-in” technology that has far more potential…

• Were you at the @Celtics game last night? Check out a 360-degree picture of TD Garden and tag yourself on Facebook: http://bit.ly/gT5qyr

There’s not much to explain here; the photo (almost) says everything. If a photo is worth a thousand words, what’s a 5-billion pixel 360-degree view shot of the Garden worth? We’re attempting to find out. This is a pretty nascent technology that involves some old-school photography and some new-school software.

The photo is actually a bunch of hi-res shots taken with a basic digital SLR camera that pivots 360 degrees, and then the shots are sown together with some pretty fancy software. I’m over-simplifying here, but the end result is pretty magical. Mix in a little Facebook Connect and you’ve got yourself a pretty neat app.

At this point, you probably couldn’t get this done on a nightly basis without spending some serious cash, but there are some really cool ways that the Celtics could leverage this technology down the road. For instance, when fans check into the image on Facebook, it could help us identify people who attend our games but never buy tickets themselves simply by matching check-in results against our existing database. Could these missing fans become ticket prospects down the line? Absolutely.

And really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Ether way, we were super excited to work with Virtual Africa on the project and look forward to how their technology and process evolves.

Location-based social networks lose steam: The darlings of 2010, location-based social platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla have gotten plenty of hype (not to mention VC funding) but have they really gained any traction? Foursqure reportedly just passed 5 million registrations, but when I see my digital acquaintances check in at venues with 3 others, I’m underwheled and more importantly, unmoved. And when Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley even admits to check-in fatigue on his own Big Idea, that should be the first sign of a problem, right?

I mean, is Biz Stone sick of Tweeting? Does Mark Zuckerberg take breaks from Facebooking? Who knows? What I do know is that I tried Foursquare for about a week and quickly lost interest. And I’m supposed to be hip to all of this stuff. If a digital dork like me doesn’t care, why would Joe Schmo?

At the end of the day, checking-in is a forced behavior, and it’s not really a communications platform, the basis for the success of Facebook and Twitter. Add in the inherent privacy concerns of declaring your whereabouts, and the near-requirement of owning a smartphone, and there’s a lot of forces conspiring against widespread adoption.

Analytics (and analysts) will rule: As the demand for ROI increases, social media consultants and self-proclaimed “experts” will be under more and more pressure to prove their worth. Along those lines, Facebook, Twitter and the like will be under even greater pressure to provide deeper metrics to help marketers understand who they’re communicating with, how often they should be doing it, and what messages are most effective.

Facebook currently provides a pretty limited set of stats, and Twitter is slowly rolling out their own suite, but the analytics currently available are woefully underwhelming. Here’s hoping for change in 2011.

Bring on the Backlash: Social media got so much hype in 2010, there’s bound to be a backlash (if there hasn’t been one already) in 2011. As marketers don’t see instant ROI, some will question why they’re spending so much time and energy on it, and some may pull the plug, question its value, or at least de-emphasize its role in their strategies.

Meanwhile, end users continue to wise up to privacy concerns, and while the conscientious objector is few and far between, more users are realizing the risks of unfettered access to their social media profiles.

Facebook Charges Brands: Facebook dabbled in this area before by asking marketers to buy $10,000 of ad spend to run promotions on Facebook. God only knows how they policed or enforced this short-lived policy, and as 2010 drew to a close, they quietly dumped the $10,000 requirement altogether.

But as Facebook has evolved into the preeminent marketing tool in the known universe, it stands to reason that the company will continue to seek alternative streams of compensation from marketers. Given their penchant for changing the rules on a moment’s notice, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if such a change came along this year, and came with little or almost zero warning.

That said…: With 550 million+ users, Facebook has become more than a website. It’s a communications platform. And at some point, does the FCC get involved with how Facebook does business? Are they involved already? What impact will Net Neutrality legislation have on the future of Facebook, YouTube, Netflix and other digital services moving forward?

It’s something to keep an eye on.

One Billion Users: With somewhere around 550 million users today, it’s not inconceivable, given its current growth rate, that Facebook could hit 1 billion users before the end of 2011. Are there enough people left to feed such a rate of growth? Why not? The 35-54 year old demographic is Facebook’s fastest growing group.

Think about it this way: Is your Mom on Facebook yet? She will be…

Another bubble bursts: Every day, another start-up vendor cold calls my desk with the latest and greatest third party solution that’s supposed to help my company grow its presence on social media and drive revenue from our followers. Few have compelling stories to tell; fewer strike any confidence in me. There’s plenty of companies that are burning through VC but have little to show for it. And parent companies are said to be looking to unload underperforming social media assets.

Unfortunately, it feels all too familiar…remember the dot.com boom and bust days?

Website Traffic Drops: With more digital platforms that aren’t websites, and everything happening on mobile devices, major web destinations will see their traffic decline as people communicate via apps and spend less time “surfing” the web.

Think about it: Has your web usage declined as your social media engagement increased? Who needs ESPN.com when the headlines and scores are already a tweet away on your iPhone?

APIs Lead To AI (Or, Facebook as Skynet): It’s already been claimed and widely speculated that Facebook has algorithms that can predict, among other things, when you’re about to break up with your significant other. And it may even know things about active users that they’ve yet to discover about themselves.

Extrapolate that a bit, and I would think it stands to reason that Facebook may very well become a basis for artificial intelligence as one investor already predicted. That is, if it hasn’t become sentient already…

“The year is 2029. The machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They’ll embody human qualities, they’ll claim to be human, and we’ll believe them.”

- Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines

Scared yet?

Obvious Predictions Fall Short; Unseen Developments Arise: It’s perhaps the most obvious of my relatively obvious predictions, but it’s still worth consideration. While some of these predictions are likely to come to fruition (if they haven’t already behind the scenes), the future of social media most certainly holds developments that few — if any — could predict.

What are your predictions?