Wilson, perhaps more than any other venture capitalist, spotted the emergence of social media early and profited from it. His firm, Union Square Ventures, invested early in Twitter, Tumblr, Zynga, Foursquare, and a few others.
In a post looking back at what happened in 2014, he says social media is pretty much dead.
"Entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications," says Wilson. "We still use them. But there isn’t much innovation here anymore. The big platforms are mature. Their place is secure."
Messaging apps have replaced social media apps, says Wilson.
"Messaging is the new social media ... Families use WhatsApp groups instead of Facebook. Kids use Snapchat instead of Instagram. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in February of this year was the transaction that defined this trend."
Wilson thinks messaging and mobile moved into the enterprise in a big way in 2014. He says Slack, the fast growing group chart, is the "poster boy" for this trend.
Here is Wilson's complete list of what happened in 2014:
1/ the social media phase of the Internet
ended. this may have happened a few years ago actually but i felt it
strongly this year. entrepreneurs and developers still build social
applications. we still use them. but there isn’t much innovation here
anymore. the big platforms are mature. their place is secure.
2/ messaging is the new social media.
this may be part of what is going on in 1/. families use whatsapp groups
instead of facebook. kids use snapchat instead of instagram. facebook’s
acquisition of whatsapp in february of this year was the transaction
that defined this trend.
3/ the “sharing economy” was outed as the
“rental economy.” nobody is sharing anything. people are making money,
plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time)
as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Uber and Airbnb are
the big winners in this category but there are and will be others.
4/ the capital markets have moved to the
internet. we call it crowdfunding but what is really going on is raising
money is a great application of a global platform that connects
billions of people in real time. i don’t know the total amount of
capital that was raised on the internet across all sectors (equity,
debt, creative projects, charity, helping a person in need, real estate,
energy, etc, etc) in 2014 but i am sure it is in the tens of billions.
5/ mobile OS has become a stable duopoly
around the world. but android is splintering into google android and non
google android and that may lead to new large players. 2014 was a big
coming out party for xiaomi. if and when they come to the US, things
will get interesting. they are the new (and better) samsung.
6/ mobile and messaging has started to impact the enterprise. slack is the poster boy for this trend in 2014.
7/ youtube became a monster. it always
has been. but in 2014 youtube emerged as the place for entertainment
consumption for anyone under 16. and these youngsters are going to grow
up quickly. watching The Interview on YouTube was a fitting end to an
amazing year for the king (and queen and joker too) of Internet video.
8/ we finally got rid of files. dropbox,
google drive, soundcloud, spotify, netflix, hbogo, youtube, wattpad,
kindle, and a host of other cloud based services finally killed off
three letter filenames like mp3, mov, doc and xls. spending a week in
the caribbean with young adults and bad internet was the tell on this
one for me. they don’t even have mp3s on their iphones anymore!
9/ the net neutrality debate emerged as a
national political issue with Obama’s endorsement of Title II
regulation of the last mile of the internet. it is unclear how this
issue will resolve itself but the public has spoken loudly and clearly and
politicians understand that the internet needs to remain open for
innovation and we can’t let the monopoly carriers and cable companies
mess that up.
10/ cyberwarfare, cybercrime,
cyberhacking, and cybersecurity was by far the dominant theme of 2014.
if anyone had their head in the sand on this one before this year, they
don’t anymore. this is our new normal. the US takedown of North Korea’s
internet last week, and the state department official’s comment that “i
guess accidents can happen” is a moment to remember as we head out of
2014 and into our future.
