The lighthearted 'All I Want for Christmas' post is almost as much of a year-end blog tradition as a list of ponderous predictions for the year in digital ahead. So to save everyone time, I thought I’d combine the two.
Here’s my iStocking stuffer prediction wishlist:
1. The International Court of Justice in The Hague will declare it a felony offence to tweet that you’re signing off Twitter because you’re too busy to tweet.
2. The W3 Consortium in Geneva will finally issue a ‘deep and heartfelt apology’ for creating a global communications medium used by billions of people that requires them to preface page locations with an abbreviation for 'Hyper Text Transfer Protocol' followed by two forward slashes and a colon.
3. To supplement the 'Like' button, Facebook will add a new button, 'Tolerate Temporarily', specifically designed for companies running competitions.
4. The MIT New Media Laboratory will release a white paper recommending that for every fifty links any web user shares about cool things they’ve found on the web, they must share at least one link to something cool they did themselves.
5. All ‘Deal-of-the-Day’ sites will be legally obligated to disclose exactly how the merchant offering the deal is intending to make you end up feeling it really wasn’t such a great deal after all.
6. Android will decisively overtake the iPhone in Australia when Google releases a ‘Siri’-like function that does your ironing and mixes a mean mojito without you even asking.
7. Providers of Twitter-based customer service will replace live social service reps with 'ITR' systems that robotically Direct Tweet you irrelevant questions and then ask you to ReTweet during business hours.
8. Media buying agencies will start telling clients they won’t even consider booking a mix of MRECs and Leaderboards as part of a ‘cross-channel integrated campaign' because they clearly need to look at the client's digital agency's campaign ideas first.
9. Companies that release anything using Wolfram Alpha search technology will start admitting they’re not really sure what it is either, but it just sounds so freakin’ cool.
10. After spending their formative years competing with laptops, Wii Fits, smartphones and tablets for their parents’ attention, the first wave of Gen Z will ask Santa for cool analogue stuff like yo-yos and trampolines, proudly declaring their generation the 'Digital Naïfs.'