Being in the social media space, I’m always thinking about what may happen next since it’s important for me to strategically steer our company down the right path. There are so many factors at play as social networks continue to evolve to satisfy users’ growing appetites.  Based on my ongoing research and understanding, I expect we’ll see a number of things happen this year that will cause a shift in the way social media functions and how we fit into it.

First off, we’ll continue to see games, games and more games — which means a lot more players and developers too.  This is partly due to the fact that Facebook appears to treat game developers as first-class citizens.  After all, if statistics such 50% of Facebook users actively playing games is true, game developers directly feed Facebook’s growth and stickiness.  Many speculate it’s due to market movers in that genre such as Zynga, who keeps content fresh, minimizes scammy advertisers, and advertises heavily themselves on Facebook. I speculate that once Facebook plateaus in growth, even though they have a long way to go before that happens, a resulting gaming market crash will ensure.  But while times are still good – keep on farming those strawberries!

I anticipate that social networks like Facebook will continue to clamp down on viral channels in an attempt to mitigate spam. That said, the viral channel will be left open for creative, engaging games, giving app creators an existing powerful viral channel to use.  While non-game apps will still have promotional tools such as wall posts and feeds, the notifications channel will be closed for these types of apps.  App creators can still overcome this handicap by creating more quality apps, and yes, even lite games soon too.

We’ve seen the beginnings, but even more advertising dollars will shift to social media in 2010 than in 2009. Advertisers are embracing social media as THE medium to reach certain sets of consumers, and are able to deliver highly targeted messages through this channel.  Companies such as Groupon.com is a great example of a simple concept that leverage the power and trust of social networks in a big way, in this case connecting millions of users to local small businesses.  We’ll also see social networks requiring a greater accountability from both advertisers and developers to ensure they meet stricter rules of engagement that seem to be emerging by the day.

For users around the world, we’ll see the internationalization of content, including apps translated into many languages. There will also be increased standards around privacy as users continue to demand it.

As we dive into 2010, it’s my hope that AppBank’s unique model and base of thousands of loyal app creators will continue to be successful and morph to meet changing times no matter what the next big genre of content on social networks is!