ReadWriteWeb, a blog we often enjoy, has a post today that seems a little…odd. It’s called “10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009” and they explain it thusly:

“Social media” was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it…But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie….Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people’s social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you’ll need to take into consideration in the coming year:

It’s unclear why the first sentence designates “Social Media” as something that was a term du jour when the post is focused on its next generation. That aside, the list of 10 areas seems a bit…familiar:

  1. It’s About People
  2. Creating Meaning and Value
  3. Enabling Convergence
  4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience
  5. Creating Relevant Social Networks
  6. Innovating in the Advertising Space
  7. Helping People Organize Their “Old” Social Media Ecosystem
  8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World
  9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs
  10. Making Money

Over three years ago, in 2005, before Saddam Hussein’s trial started, before Scooter Libby resigned, before Twitter even existed, someone said something sort of similar:

  • Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  • Trusting users as co-developers
  • Harnessing collective intelligence
  • Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
  • Software above the level of a single device
  • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business model

There are a differences, sure. The second list is a more tech-oriented and not numbered. But if the first list is supposed to be what to expect in 2009 and the second list is what people were seeing in 2005 then it seems like a lot of the changes in “social media” or how it’s talked about have been about a move towards focusing on exactly the “du jour”-ness qualities of it. In short, the 10 ways social media will change in 2009 add up to “it will continue to be hyped and to be about (its own) hype.”

That second list is what Tim O’Reilly mapped out as the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies is his (potentially over) influential articulation of “What Is Web 2.0“. It seems like the advice RWW is giving to the CEOs of start-ups and the description O’Reilly gave of model Web 2.0 companies have a few things in common. Now, of course there was more to the RWW list than just the numbered headers. They’ve got some arguments and examples to present. However, here are the closing lines of their point number two:

People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

The first sentence is a technical question. It’s one that’s been explicitly addressed from the very beginning of the Web 2.0 era: “Software above the level of a single device” (also maybe some “services, not packaged software” and “lightweight user interfaces” too) . The second sentence, on the other hand, makes no sense to me at all. This is one of the reasons we like to write about things like how micro-messaging and/or micro-blogging may or may not have been particularly significant in shaping the social Web in 2008 and/or 2009. Forcasting technological change or (micro-level) social change is hard. Trying to predict what comes next when the two intertwine in multiple feedback loops with some culture thrown in for good measure…well, that’s tough to do without making generalizations so broad as to be meaningless. Our solution is to shy away from talking about that term du jour and try our best to focus on specific social technologies and the sepcific cultural arrangements that grow up with and arround them.

That, and to nitpick posts from elsewhere.