10 ways social media will change in 2010

What you can expect this year.

Last year, I wrote about the 10 ways social media would change in 2009.

2009 will go down in Internet history as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media and mainstream adoption began to move at the speed of light. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated that social media can mobilize millions of people. Iran’s election protests showed how use of social media can affect freedom of speech.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users in November 2009. Seventy percent of Facebook’s users live outside of the U.S., and Facebook is responsible for 25 percent of the Web’s traffic. Nearly one in five people on the Web use Twitter, and 94 percent of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investments in social media tools.

So what will social media bring next? What will “being connected” mean? Here are 10 ways social media will evolve this year.