With 2008 almost over, here are my predictions of what I feel will happen in internet marketing and social media for 2009:

1. Twitter Will Get Bought Out

Twitter is THE biggest trend on the internet right now and will continue to dominate in 2009. I personally prefer to use Twitter over Facebook for marketing. Twitter is the perfect medium allowing you to communicate and build relationships with your prospects; Facebook is used more for connecting with old friends. If the people over at Twitter know what they’re doing, they can easily transform it into the ultimate human search engine (much more powerful than Mahalo) with real time and relavent sources. I’ve personally witnessed this with Twitscoop. With that being said, if Twitter can’t figure out a way to make money then sooner or later they will get bought out by Google or a major Internet player. They can’t just ask money from VCs forever. Plus, Twitter is such a goldmine that Google will be a fool to pass on this opportunity if they are presented with it.

2. Mobile Applications Will Take-Off

I truly believe mobile apps will become the future of the internet (another reason why Twitter is becoming so successful). But more importantly, mobile apps that can be INTEGRATED across all platforms (yet again why Twitter is so successful). The technology is still very new and flawed so I don’t see it getting THAT big just yet. But 2009 is definitely going to be the year when it takes-off.

3. A New Tool To Help Us With Organization

The internet is overloaded with information. We are already getting information overload – RSS feeds, blogs, email, Twitter, Facebook etc. There needs to be a way to group these information into an organized manner. As Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said rightly in this video, right now Twitter is just a mess (when it comes to organizing the information). There needs to be a way to group tweets and filter out your friends in this noisy envirornment. And most importantly, we need friend synchronization – a way to connect all our friends, depending on your preferences, on the different social networking sites (Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) with just one click. Because right now, it’s just so hard to friend with people because they are everywhere. A big market here.

4. Videos – Interactive And Live Streaming

Video will continue to get bigger and bigger. Hopefully with the advancement in technology, we will begin to see more interactive videos (we’re seeing YouTube trying to achive that with their annotation feature) as well as better live streaming (again, we just saw YouTube do that with their recent YouTube Live event) with bigger bandwith.

5. Social Media Continues To Grow

Social media will become an integral part of the marketing campaign for all businesses in the future. Like Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said in this video, the future of Twitter is with marketers. e-Commerce, Business To Business will all start entering the social media arena. I wouldn’t be surprise if another social media site like Twitter pops up in 2009.

Your views for 2009? Leave a comment below 🙂