Working in a young and burgeoning industry is often exciting, often frenetic and always fascinating. 

Sometimes, however, we like to pause for a moment and have a think about the direction social is taking. We’ve put together a short list of predictions for the shape social will take in 2012. 

Back to reality

In his article ‘The Ugly Truth: Why Beauty Wins in 2012’, Edward Aten, founder of Swift.fm, suggests that 2012 will be the year that the web becomes even more aesthetically pleasing, with services like Instagram soaring in popularity as users redesign the world around them. 

‘Instagram makes our pictures less accurate, but what we lose in exactness we gain in the ability to create instant nostalgia and show our view of our subjects,’ says Aten, going on to claim that 2012 will be the year we further beautify the net. 

While it’s undeniable that 2011 saw a continuation of the upward trend in popularity of visual platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, we would argue the opposite to Aten. 

For us, 2012 could represent a return to reality. As our feeds become saturated with doctored images, we predict a backlash that will see users yearn for an unaltered view of the world around us - this will not just affect image services, but video and live reporting and writing using services like Storify.

Social becomes more exclusive

Google+ and Path may not have the user bases of Facebook, but they both incorporate a strong idea – limiting your exposure to superfluous ‘friends’, delivering a stream of content you actually care about rather than a flood of inanity. 

While Google+ does this by separating your contacts into Circles that you can switch between, Path really goes the whole hog, limiting the overall size of your network. 

In 2012, we predict moves into this area from Facebook. Selective updates are a relatively new feature, and the value of a smaller, more engaged network will be one that is highly cherished in 2012. We love Path here at Rabbit, and we’re very interested to see what 2012 holds for the network. 

The days of the guru are numbered

The Klout debacle near the end of 2011 showed that measuring influence in social media isn’t an easy or exact science.

With the sector being a year older, a year wiser and a year more experienced, 2012 will see clients, brands and agencies asking much more of self proclaimed social media ‘gurus’, with a real level of expertise being an absolute necessity as more people wise up to how social works. 

As Kevin Green says in his BostonInno piece, ‘it’s hard not to believe that companies are becoming more savvy at identifying the pretenders.’ In 2012, it won’t be enough just to claim expertise, there will need to be evidence of long lasting, quantifiable success. 

Make or break time for location-based networks

In his talk at Le Web last year, Forrester CEO George Colony foretold the impending demise of what he described as ‘some of the nonsense like Foursquare and some of these time-wasting social applications.’ So is the writing on the wall for location-based networks?

In a relatively short amount of time, photo-sharing network Instagram has matched the total user base of Foursquare (15m), despite Foursquare being cross-platform and incentivised. 

In early 2011 the success of location-based was thought to be dependent on the quality of the incentives offered. Gamifying something by offering points and badges is all well and good, but once the initial excitement wears off, the user is left with, well, not all that much. 

With Facebook buying Gowalla, and Google’s Schemer currently in closed beta, it’s clear that people aren’t giving up on location just yet. However, if something big doesn’t happen in 2012, location’s days may well be numbered. 

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