Five Trends that Will Shape Social Media
The past few years have seen some spectacular changes in the technology that embeds itself in our daily lives. The perfect storm of social media, smart phones and location awareness is only beginning to take full effect. We've gazed into crystal ball and considered how we think these technologies will combine to become such an established fabric of our lives that in the next few years what we've written here won't be considered amazing at all.
Your social media identities (Twitter username, Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, Digg profile, etc.) will be entered as part of setting up your devices and propagated into all applications. Apps will then be able to access social network functionality through APIs and be able to use embedded identity without need for entering credentials.
You'll no longer have to enter your Twitter or Facebook credentials to access Twitter and Facebook functionality on mobile phone apps, they will seamlessly access your profile in the same way that a "mailto:" link opens an already configured email client on your desktop. The recently rumoured Facebook phone is an example how this approach could be applied.
The sign of success for a major social media platform will become whether device manufacturers and browsers include its identity as part of their configuration settings.