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OK, so we’re three days in. But that still means 363 days to go (it’s a leap year don’t forget) in which all sorts of things can happen, and launch, and get bought.

I’m not going to do an exhaustive run down of all the things I think might happen this year. You’ve probably read loads of those types of posts already. What I want to look at is how attitudes might evolve, specifically in the corporate sector.
We all know about the rampant rise of social networks over the past 18 months. What’s going to happen over the next 12 months is anyone guess. What I believe we’ll see is more and more big corporates starting to adopt the common toolsets that are evident in all these sites and services.

It may have taken some time for many parties to realise, but a lot of corporate organisations, through their intranets and various extranets have large communities of employees, contacts and suppliers already in place. I know of one site inparticular which exhibits 40,000+ registered users all sharing a very specific professional interest area. Imagine the power of applying tools such as Port 80-safe instant messaging (think Twitter), a way of finding people by specific interest and location (think LinkedIn), a mechanism to create special interest groups (think Facebook Groups), a way to share images and videos for discussion (think Flickr or YouTube) and a way or distributing content throughout the network without clogging inboxes (think DropSend or similar).

By utilising these tried and tested tools we can increase loyalty and participation amongst the community as well as encourage adoption by parties who might otherwise see no discernible value in joining if it were a ‘vanilla’ one-to-many model.

My next prediction for 2008, though to be honest more of a wish, would be the widespread adoption by large organisations of lightweight platforms and technologies. I’ve had my time of requirements gathering and interface design for multi-million dollar, 18 month SAP implementations. Now, these things will always have their place. When tracking manufacturing output of a 35,000 strong workforce you will need some pretty beefy reporting tools. However, surely a wiki or blog or IM tool for a special interest group of 300 people within the organisation can be built in a lightweight, agile manner? I’m not a developer, but I have seen some pretty punchy pieces of functionality built in days and now in use by thousands on a day-to-day basis. There must be some merit in these ways of working for the appropriate projects.

Hopefully we will begin to see a new dawn in 2008 so we can begin to create some truly powerful communities for specific uses which take the online community and social media beyond glorified dating services.