Thursday, 19 March 2009

Social media will be over in 2009

Craig Stoltz says that social media will cease to exist in 2009.

Back in my callow youth, in 1996, I was reporting on an “online travel” technology conference for the Washington Post. It focused on the breathtaking development that the Internet would soon let people actually purchase airline tickets and hotel visits online, without a travel agent or even a phone call!

But I vividly recall one of the panelists saying something like this:

No offense to the conference organizers, but in five years there will be no “online travel.” The Internet will be fully integrated into commercial transactions and the term “online travel business” won’t mean anything different from “travel business.”

I think of this often as it applies to social media. I think by the end of 2009 what we now call “social media” will start to become just “media.”