Changes in technology and their impact on the world have been relentless over the last few years, and 2012 doesn’t look to be any different. Below is a list of predictions and trends for 2012.

Social networking continues to dominate

The number of global Facebook users reached 700 million in 2011, and is predicted to reach 1 billion in 2012. While growing fast in countries like Brazil, Facebook already dominates social networking in the West. Twitter’s rise, especially in the media, looks set to continue. Social networking played a key role in the civil unrest of 2011, most noticeably in the ‘Arab Spring’, and we can expect to see more people organise online this year. This is the year that companies are going to attempt to drive a lot of their sales directly through social networking, although I’m a bit sceptical about this being successful. People primarily use social media to socialise and not to shop.

Increasingly, people are spending more time on their phone checking email than they do making calls. Mobile devices are one of the fastest moving areas of technology, and there is a bewildering choice of handsets now available. The Blackberry has been dominant amongst business users for years, with the iPhone the established choice for the fashionable consumer. But there are other big players, such as Microsoft and Google as well as the traditional mobile phone companies - and things are, as always, changing.