One prediction you can take to the bank is that at the end of the year every “expert” in every industry will make predictions for the coming year.  It’s a generally harmless exercise and, fortunately, readers have short memories.  In that spirit, here are my predictions for Enterprise 2.0/social media for the coming year:

1.  Social networking will go vertical.  The big general interest sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com will continue to grow, but at a slower pace. Smaller sites targeted at users with shared interests will boom.  Niche-oriented networks aimed at people who are passionate about a particular topic may not attract millions of users but many will become significant and sustainable businesses.  Companies to watch:  Sermo.com, an online community for doctors, CarSpace, a site for car enthusiasts; Classical Lounge; a site for composers and musicians; Dogster and Catster, (take a guess).    

2.  Multi-purpose collaboration platforms that deliver applications for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework while allowing easy content and permissions management will easily capture the corporate market for social software.  Big winner:  Blogtronix, the Swiss Army knife of collaboration platforms.  Socialtext has made some important alliances and will continue to be a top contender.  So will Confluence.  Big loser:  Six Apart.  Blogging platforms are so last week.  Next must-have function:  Interactive video.

3.  The Empire will strike back.  IBM and Microsoft will jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon in a big way but in their usual top-heavy style that aims to please IT by building in a lot of expensive control functions that frustrate end users and ensures that social software experiments are likely to fail in large organizations.  They will probably do very well.

4. The Anti-Empire will emerge.  A new breed of company–call it the anti-IBM and anti-Microsoft–will emerge that aims to make life for knowledge workers easier and more fun by “consumerizing” the experience of endless toggling between desktop and web apps.  Write this down somewhere:  Serendipity Technologies. 

5.  User-generated applications will become the next hot thing.  If Web 1.0 was “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read/write,” the next logical growth phase will be “read/write/execute.”  User generated applications will emerge that allow users to tie together web services to dynamically create custom functionality without having to know anything about programming or development.  Big winner:  Teqlo.