Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The past year was an eventful one for the world of social networking. Facebook went on an acquisition spree. Twitter started growing up. And MySpace? Well it’s the same old story over there.

In 2010, we predicted that Facebook would conquer the web. We just didn’t know the social network would do it so convincingly. We’re not oracles, though, and we did miss on some of our acquisition picks. Well, time for round two.

Now that Facebook is clearly king, what is going to happen to the rest of the world’s social networks? What will happen to Bebo? What’s next for MySpace? And will Facebook finally hold that IPO?

Here are my predictions for what will happen in the world of social networking in 2011:

---

1. Google’s Social Networking Efforts Flop Spectacularly

---

Google dominates search. It has nailed mobile. Oh, and it owns YouTube, the web’s biggest video property. So why the heck does it fail so miserably at social?

Until this year, Google’s had middling success in social — YouTube, Gmail, Gtalk, Blogger and Orkut have all had varying levels of success. This year though, Google Wave was shut down, Google Buzz flopped and Google’s big social initiative has been delayed due to in-fighting and a lack of clarity and purpose.

Here’s my first prediction of the year: Google’s social media efforts will be spectacular failures. TechCrunch nabbed a screenshot of the “Google +1″ social toolbar, one big component of Google’s social plan, we’ve been told. We remain unimpressed, though. As Buzz demonstrated, sticking something social on a page doesn’t mean people will instantly use it.

More importantly, Google as a company is built for speed and efficiency, neither of which are critical to the success of a social network. That’s why we predict another horrendous year for the search giant in the social realm.

---

2. A Middling MySpace Is Sold Off

---

Despite a total redesign and overhaul, MySpace continues to plummet like a boulder pushed off a cliff. While we’re fans of the social network’s attempt to reinvent itself as a “social entertainment destination,” the frank truth is that MySpace is bleeding money and there’s no end in sight to the bloodshed.

Eventually MySpace will bottom out; we just don’t know when. It won’t come soon enough for News Corp. though, and it will start looking for someone to take its high-profile Internet property off of its hands. MySpace is still a valuable asset in the right hands, so somebody will pick it up.

---

3. Bebo Gets a New Owner… Again

---

Bebo’s fall from grace is one of the sad stories of social networking. When we first covered Bebo in 2006, it was on its way to becoming a powerhouse. In 2008, AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million, an astounding (and overvalued) price point.

Six months ago, AOL sold Bebo for about $10 million to Criterion Capital Partners. Then they made a few big moves: they hired Kevin Bachus, co-creator of the Xbox, and brought Bebo co-founder Michael Birch back as an advisor and investor.

Bebo’s still shrinking though. Unless Birch and Bachus can orchestrate a comeback of Rocky proportions, Criterion Capital Partners will start looking to make money on its investment or at least minimize its loss. Even if it makes a comeback, Criterion’s reportedly interested in selling Bebo this year.

We expect Bebo to be in new hands by this time next year. The most likely acquirers, we believe, would be a group led by Birch himself.

---

4. No Facebook IPO in 2011

---

There have been countless rumors about a Facebook IPO since 2007. The media has been waiting with baited breath for the day that Mark Zuckerberg cashes in on his baby and turns his company public.

I’m here to tell the media: Don’t hold your breath.

I could create a list of reasons the size of an SUV why Facebook and its billionaire leader aren’t going to be raising money on the public markets. Here are just a few of them:

• Mark Zuckerberg is famously uninterested in money. He believes in delayed gratification and has lived in a modest home for years — he’s the opposite of the far more extravagant Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle. In other words, he’s in no rush for a big payday.
• Secondary markets like Sharespost have changed the game for cashing out on investments. In the past, VCs needed to cash out on their investments by acquisition or IPO, but as Accel Partners proved last month, VCs no longer need an IPO to do so.
• Zuckerberg sees no strategic advantage to an IPO. In fact, it’s just a lot more paperwork, headaches and scrutiny. He’d love to delay that as long as possible.
• Facebook doesn’t believe it’s ready for an IPO: “Facebook would benefit from another year of growth absent the added scrutiny that comes with a public listing,” Business Week reported earlier this year.

The result is that there won’t be a Facebook IPO in 2011. So long as the company’s growth metrics are strong, Facebook has no need for the public markets. When it hits its saturation point though, that’s when you should expect the social network to make its move. I predict that will happen in 2012.

---

5. Twitter Has a Very Boring 2011

---

While I don’t consider Twitter a social network, many people do, so it’s only appropriate that I provide a prediction for what will happen to Twitter in 2011.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with anything interesting: Twitter’s going to have a steady and boring 2011.

Sure, Twitter will launch new features, and senior execs will continue to step down and new people will take their place, but that’s what happens to any maturing business. Now that Twitter has new funding, has launched its ad platform and has launched a complete redesign, is there an earth-shattering event that could take us by surprise?

I don’t discount it; I just don’t predict there will be one. An IPO makes no sense with the new round of funding. A redesign isn’t necessary. Really, Twitter is focused on its ad platform and will launch features that enhance it. Twitter will slowly continue to grow, but I don’t expect Facebook-like hockey stick growth.

In 2011, Twitter is going to be one of the most boring social media services around. And I know the Twitter team is just fine with that.

---

6. The Social Networking Trend of 2011: Mobile Photos

---

“We’re in a unique time right now because of the power of the cell phone with the two cameras, both the front and the back, and the broadband networks that allow photos to be shared simply and consumed through social networks in realtime.” ~Brian Pokorny, Dailybooth CEO

Pokorny was discussing during his Ignite talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He argued that publishing has evolved from the desktop (blogging) to the phone (tweeting) to the smartphone (photo-taking).

While social photography is nothing new (Flickr and Facebook dominate), mobile photography is just beginning to blossom, thanks to apps like Instagram, PicPlz, Path, and Dailybooth. Other services like Tumblr, Gowalla, Posterous and most recently Foursquare are only pushing the trend further.

2011 will be the year mobile photo sharing becomes all the rage. These services will hit critical mass as smartphone users install apps in order to keep up with their friends. I also predict that Facebook will join the fray and implement new mobile photo-sharing features integrated with its Places platform, bringing the whole trend to another level.

---

What Are Your Predictions?

---

Enough with my predictions. What do you predict will happen in the social networking space in 2011? Who will get acquired? Who will be acquiring? What will the big trends in social networking be next year?

Let us know your answers in the comments below.

---

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, temniy

The economy will be going gangbusters

Your knowledge will reach critical mass

Your boss will give you the go ahead (and agree to take the heat if things don’t work out)

Your family situation will be stable

The competition will stop innovating

Someone else will drive the carpool, freeing up a few hours a week

There won’t be any computer viruses to deal with, and

Your neighbor will return the lawnmower.

Then…

You can ship, you can launch your project, you can make the impact you’ve been planning on.

Of course, all of these things won’t happen. Why not ship anyway?

While others were hiding last year, new products were launched, new subscriptions were sold and new companies came into being. While they were laying low, websites got new traffic, organizations grew, and contracts were signed. While they were stuck, money was being lent, star employees were hired and trust was built.

Most of all, art got created.

That’s okay, though, because it’s all going to happen again in 2011. It’s not too late, just later than it was.

When it comes to the available sources of renewable energy, most of the focus is on the sun, since all other sources, like wind and biomass, ultimately are derived from it. But solar presents its own challenges, because it’s most easily converted into heat or electricity and we can’t store either of these at a high enough density for uses like transportation.

This explains why there’s a lot of effort going into things like biofuels and using electricity to produce hydrogen. Each additional step, however, involves a potential inefficiency.

These problems are what makes a system described in the current issue of Science very appealing. The authors demonstrate a device that is capable of taking solar energy and using it directly to split water, releasing oxygen and hydrogen. It can also perform a similar conversion on carbon dioxide, converting it to carbon monoxide and oxygen.

Better yet, it doesn’t need an exotic catalyst. Instead, its catalyst is based on cerium, an element that’s about as abundant as copper, and is stable for hundreds of cycles.

The structural part of the device is remarkably simple. Most of it acts simply as a focusing lens, which directs sunlight through a transparent quartz window and into a reaction chamber. That chamber is designed for internal reflection, and is efficient enough that most of the photons get captured.

“The selected dimensions ensure multiple internal reflections and efficient capture of incoming solar energy; the apparent absorptivity exceeds 0.94, approaching the ideal blackbody limit,” the authors claim.

Once absorbed, those photons are converted to heat. Temperatures rise at a rate of 140 Celsius degrees 242 Fahrenheit degrees a minute until they clear 1,250 degrees Celsius 2,282 degrees Fahrenheit, before stabilizing between 1,400 and 1,600 degrees Celsius 2,552 and 2,912 degrees Fahrenheit. Those temperatures are hot enough to cause a chemical change in the catalyst, a cylinder of porous cerium dioxide.

At the high temperatures present in this phase of the reaction cycle, the cerium dioxide loses one of its two oxygens. By flowing some inert gas over the porous cylinder, the authors were able to detect a steady flow of oxygen off the device, which lasted for more than an hour before falling off. (Peak rate was 34 milliliters 1.2 fluid ounces of oxygen per minute from the 325-milligram 0.011-ounce sample of cerium dioxide.)

Once oxygen production tailed off, the device could be dropped to a lower temperature (900 degrees Celsius, or 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit) and a reactant pumped into the chamber. When water vapor was used, the catalyst would strip out its oxygen to re-form cerium dioxide. This releases hydrogen quickly and efficiently. This portion of the reaction was typically complete in less than 10 minutes. Alternately, carbon dioxide could be pumped in, in which case carbon monoxide was produced.

The devices produced by the authors would tend to have an erratic drop in performance over the first hundred cycles, which they found was associated with a rearrangement of the cerium oxide structure through the repeated heatings. Once the material formed somewhat larger particles, performance stabilized and remained stable out to 400 cycles.

The authors use a complex formula to calculate the efficiency of the device, one that accounts for things like the solar input, the flow rate of the inert gas, and the energy required to purify the outputs. According to their calculations, the results are pretty impressive.

“The solar-to-fuel energy conversion efficiency obtained in this work for CO2 dissociation is about two orders of magnitude greater than that observed with state-of-the-art photocatalytic approaches,” they state. “The gravimetric hydrogen production rate exceeds that of other solar-driven thermochemical processes by more than an order of magnitude.”

There are some drawbacks to this system, of course. A steady supply of inert gas is needed, and the water and carbon dioxide that are used as inputs have to be kept pure to keep other chemicals from building up on the porous material.

Pure water is often a fairly rare commodity that requires significant energy to produce. But the system also produces significant amounts of waste heat that could be harvested and put to use (the primary inefficiency right now is heat loss).

The ability to switch the system between carbon monoxide and hydrogen production is also intriguing. We already use these two ingredients to produce methanol, which can be transported in bulk and used in fuel cells, and it may be possible to combine them into more complex hydrocarbons. It might also be possible to use this as a part of a carbon sequestration system.

In any case, the researchers involved specifically designed the hardware to be easy to manufacture in bulk and incorporate into a industrial-size facility, so it seems to be a serious attempt at getting something that could be tested in a real-world deployment.

This story was written by John Timmer and originally published by Ars Technica on Dec. 23.
Photo: theregeneration/Flickr