It is funny how sometimes one word is suitable to describe a whole range of concepts, behaviors and events. If I were to choose just one word to describe the year 2010, the word would be: SOCIAL. And it’s not just because 2010 happens to be the year facebook finally pronounced its social media dominance and nested cozily between Yahoo! and Google. It’s because in a couple of years 2010 is going to be seen as ‘the year the social media craze really took off’.

How do I know? Of course I don’t have the benefit of hindsight, but it’s pretty obvious that it is not any magical feature introduced by facebook that is responsible for this eruption in popularity. It’s the result of a long-term trend. A trend that facebook is benefitting from, and which facebook is fueling at the same time. For that reason it’s safe to say that it’s going to continue throughout 2011, but it’s going to be much more noticeable thanks to the buzz generated in 2010. And now for the big news: the social media market is far from saturation.

Facebook was the first to really get the message across and show the world how important it is for people to share and interact. Now it is up to everyone else to make use of that knowledge. Therefore it is quite safe to assume that 2011 is going to be the year of adding social components to pretty much everything. Now you must be thinking: currently social platforms already promote sharing information about absolutely everything. There isn’t much out there on the Web that wouldn’t already have a social dimension, right?

Not exactly.

There are many, many niche activities that you would never think suitable for this kind of makeover. They’re out there, just waiting for people to turn them into social platforms. Social comic book reading, how is that for an example? Graphicly.com is already pretty well known in its (relatively wide) niche and getting more and more popular as you read this article. Social bird watching? Why not. Social gardening? Of course. Who wouldn’t like to discuss the way plants grow (in real time). Social fortune-telling? Why didn’t I think of that before… And that’s just off the top of my head. The need to socialize has always been there. Now that people became familiar with the concept of social media through the “mainstream” social media channels, it’s time for some more diversity.

And that’s where StormDriver comes in. The need to socialize and share online is so great that it is time to rethink the whole idea of social networking. We all agree that sharing and interacting is important. If so, why not give the people who are visiting a given website the opportunity to get together and exchange ideas? It is very likely that people who share your browsing habits also share your interests. There’s also a good chance they may have some very interesting insights on this article you are reading. Isn’t that simple?

2011 is going to be the year StormDriver sees the daylight. Will it become instantly popular? We shall see. What is certain is that it’s going to become a very useful tool for the niche communities I mentioned earlier. A tool which allows you to share your thoughts about content on the spot, when and where you discover it. Be the first to discover what StormDriver can do for you and get invited to test StormDriver once an alpha release is out in early 2011! Prepare for a wild ride!

Tags: 2011, Facebook, sharing content, social media, social networks, StormDriver, trends