Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Wow! 2007 seemed to just fly by. Who would have believed that Yahoo and AOL would merge to create an even more bloated media conglomerate with little to offer besides Flickr. The market loved it for a few days, but then soon realized there was not much in terms of user and customer base. Google continued to dominate in search, taking market share from Yahoo and Live.com, but others started to get in the game. ChaCha.com became the lazy man’s search engine having someone else do the research for you, but it turned out to be a lot of fun to just mess with the ChaCha search reps [insert YouTube video here] and people realized that the search reps were just pushing the PPC advertising instead of legitimate search results.

Myspace made some strides with a new user interface, but continued to see it’s numbers dropping off as more and more users move to niche markets and more private venues, instead of announcing everything to the world. It appeared that CyWorld and MySpace were on the verge of a merger to create the world’s largest social networking site, but it’s unsure why talks fell apart. The CyWorld asking price of $2.8Billion proved to be just too much for Rupert Murdoch.

Vista launched to much fan fare, but sales were sluggish for the first few months of the year, especially with the numerous reported security holes and the lack of a real reason for users to upgrade their systems already. Microsoft did enjoy an initial spike in traffic on Live.com as part of the integrated functionality of Vista and Live.com, but users soon jumped ship after Google launched an add-on to push all Vista search traffic through their site.

Apple launched their iTV product which did very well with initial sales, but really exploded when they partnered with NetFlix and Tivo to deliver on demand television shows and movies. Apple’s iPhone is doing extremely well especially with the integration of iTunes and their lightweight MacOS, which allows for browsing and email.

Well, I think that pretty much covers it. 2007 was pretty good, but it looks like 2008 is looking to be even better. 3-D TV, Next Gen Internet, and the 2008 Scion.

UPDATE:  Predictions for iPhone and iTV (Apple TV) have come true. Stay tuned for further updates. Myspace interface redesign? Yahoo and AOL merger? We’ll see.