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.

One website that has been getting quite a bit of press coverage recently is Klout. This is a new service that attempts to measure online influence by monitoring social networking traffic.  It allocates a score of between 1 and 100 to individuals and organisations, with the higher the score, the greater the influence.

The founder, Joe Fernandez, had the idea for the site when he broke his jaw and, unable to talk, took to Twitter in order to communicate. He soon realised the influence of the medium, and saw how useful it would be to measure this.

Looking through the scores, they seem to reflect how many social networking users are interested in celebrity culture – Canadian teen pop idol Justin Bieber scores a perfect 100. Closer to home, Stephen Fry scores 82, Wayne Rooney gets 81 and Ed Milliband 35.

The internet has led to an increasing clash between personal and professional lives. Once upon a time it was only your CV or application that counted when trying to win a job interview, but one new trend is to vet perspective employees using their online presence.

It’s well publicised that many employees have got into trouble at work due to comments they’ve made on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. A lot of organisations now have strict internet usage policies, and it’s estimated that 8% of companies have dismissed staff due to their online actions. What is less well known is that an increasing amount of job applicants are vetted before the interview stage, using the information about them that can be garnered from the internet.

Vadodaria cosmetic surgery wanted a website for their dimple creation service.

A key aspect of the project was search engine optimisation to ensure a high position in organic search results, and so a strategy was put in place to ensure good results on an ongoing basis.

The project also involved consulting on the use of social networking systems to increase the visibility and customers to the business.

Visit the website at www.dimplecreations.co.uk.

The fallout over the publication of diplomatic information on Wikileaks illustrates how digital activism has come of age. As the US government put pressure on companies to sever ties with the international leaks website, groups fought back with a co-ordinated campaign. One group, calling itself ‘Anonymous’, proved particularly well organised.

The credit card company VISA was one of those who suspended services in the aftermath, allegedly under political duress. Soon after, the VISA website was overwhelmed by a “distributed denial of service attack’’ (DDoS) by the group called ‘Anonymous’, forcing it to go offline. The credit card company can process 10,000 transactions per second, but amazingly, their website was toppled by just 2,000 people running a simple piece of software on their machines. In reality the exercise was for propaganda purposes – Visa use a different server for their critical payments processing service – but nonetheless it demonstrated the increasing power of online activists.

Social networking has been a major part of the rise of ‘Web 2.0’, a phrase coined to represent the move towards greater information sharing and collaboration on the internet. While MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin and others have played their part, Facebook dominates social networking. As of July, 500 million people around the world use Facebook actively.As people increasingly share information on the internet there have, however, been growing concerns about the privacy. Earlier this year, Facebook came under increased pressure over poor privacy controls and a lack of transparency about how it used user data. A backlash against Facebook culminated in a project to develop Diaspora; an open source, private and secure alternative that is launched in October.