Social Media has offered new possibilities, but what will it offer in 2013.
Imaging
Social Media and images have gone hand in hand and theres nothing better then getting a message across with a funny meme. Facebook, Twitter and Flickr have all jumped on the Instagram band wagon, having introduced their own version of filters. 2013 is set to offer new improvements and will provide even more customisation for users.
Last September saw Facebook acquire Instagram for close to $1bn. Following suit, was Google’s acquisition of Snapseed, which is proving the sector is growing with more users looking to customise and edit their images.
Most of the new imaging software will be designed for apps since that’s where the majority of images are being uploaded from, with the most popular apps such as the Twitter and Facebook camera likely to see user customisation go beyond the usual filter and crop options.
Location Services
Location services has already been available to us, but 2013 could see the service being increasingly popular. We already have some amazing apps such as Foursquare, Facebook places and Google+ Local, but the real challenge is to use the data with maps, businesses and images.
Instagram has already implemented geotagging, and has potentially added revenue by taking the tagged photos and offering them to businesses for a price. The new terms of services Instagram recently released could suggest a type of sponsored stories and geotagging would make it successful.
Data privacy
We have seen various social networks receive bad press due to privacy concerns, such as the latest Instgram uproar. A problem many social networks face, is the changing and tweaking of their privacy features to accommodate future updates. When managing large communities you have to try and meet every ones expectations to avoid looking like a dictator. Users are becoming more aware of their rights and what data they’re freely giving up to these sites.
Most popular social networking sites will constantly update their privacy settings to please their massive user base, but websites such as Privacyfix will grow to be important as users will look to protect their data even more this year. However we at SocialGO look to help ease these issues with our packages offering you, full ownership of your your data.