5 Ways the Tech World will Change in 2011

This is a guest post by James Yeang. If you would like to contribute too, please contact me.

As 2010 comes to a close, I’ve whipped out my crystal ball, and here are my predictions for the year that is to come.

1. Facebook will sell stats

The social network giant has become the defacto minimum requirement for any business to engage with its community, so much so that some businesses use their Facebook page as their primary web presence rather than their official website. With millions of Facebook fan/business pages in play, coupled with the open secret that facebook tracks every click, Facebook has the ability to supply businesses with incredibly rich data on how people interact with their page – which many organizations would pay for – especially due to the horribly inadequate stats which Facebook currently provides for free.

2. Twitter will have business accounts

Just a friendly stream of data over the past few years, Twitter has come out really strong this year. Ending 2009 in the black by striking search deals with Microsoft and Google, Twitter’s business strategy all started to come together in 2010.

They started to take ownership of it’s presence across multiple platforms by releasing official apps across all major smartphone platforms, and completely redesigning its homepage.

They outlawed 3rd party in-stream twitter services and launched their own promoted tweet advertising service.

And in 2011, they will take on the likes of HootSuite by launching a full end to end way for businesses to manage their twitter presence in a professional manner. Multiple users, permissions, scheduled tweets, and more.

3. Del.icio.us will pass on

Yahoo! is looking for a buyer but I doubt it will find a suitable one. The days of social bookmarking has come and gone, and people are much more likely now to share good links rather than amass them for themselves for later use. This service never really attempted any form of monetization so it would be hard to keep afloat. Its wealth of bookmarks can already be indexed should any search engine choose to do so, so there is little value acquisition for the sake of the database. Traffic is falling fast, and this will eventually go the way of Geocities and pass on, becoming just a memory.

4. Digg will make or break in 2011

Traffic seems to have flat-lined for the mighty social news website which was once considered to be the darling of the web 2.0 industry, and everyone seems to be sounding the death knell, but unlike delicious, Digg has much larger and wider potential. V4 was a step in the right direction, but Kevin Rose needs a killer move in 2011. Personalization alone just isn’t going to cut it when everybody is already seeing links from their friends on Facebook and Twitter. It’s time for Kevin Rose to forget the power-users of Digg, forget the haters and just forge ahead with this product vision. After all, power-users doesn’t equal success. Jason Calacanis’s raid on Digg on behalf Netscape several years ago is proof of this.

5. We will start checking into Foursquare via NFC

Foursquare is a lot of fun, but after a while, check-in fatigue kicks in. The time it takes to launch an app, search for a location, find and click on the correct one, and then check-in is simply a tedious task. NFC (Near Field Communication) however makes things easier by allowing your phone to interact with the world just by putting it close to a compatible device. This technology is expected to change mobile payments, public transit systems, and quite possibly change the game of Location Based Services like Foursquare – making it easier than ever to use. All major smartphone platforms (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android) are all expected to have NFC in their 2011 lineups. This also means that QR codes, will pass on and become increasingly irrelevant in time to come.

Do you agree with these predictions? What are your own predictions for the future? Tell us in the comments!

This guest post was written by James Yeang, who writes for Friedbeef’s Tech, a Malaysian Tech Blog focused on solving everyday problems with simple technology.

[image courtesy of tokyofortwo]