For those of you don’t know yet, I’m giving away free copies to the digital version of my book eMillions over at my blog TheUniversityKid.com

All you have to do is visit TheUniversityKid.com and sign up to the exclusive newsletter on the right hand side. Enjoy

With 2008 almost over, here are my predictions of what I feel will happen in internet marketing and social media for 2009:

1. Twitter Will Get Bought Out

Twitter is THE biggest trend on the internet right now and will continue to dominate in 2009. I personally prefer to use Twitter over Facebook for marketing. Twitter is the perfect medium allowing you to communicate and build relationships with your prospects; Facebook is used more for connecting with old friends. If the people over at Twitter know what they’re doing, they can easily transform it into the ultimate human search engine (much more powerful than Mahalo) with real time and relavent sources. I’ve personally witnessed this with Twitscoop. With that being said, if Twitter can’t figure out a way to make money then sooner or later they will get bought out by Google or a major Internet player. They can’t just ask money from VCs forever. Plus, Twitter is such a goldmine that Google will be a fool to pass on this opportunity if they are presented with it.

2. Mobile Applications Will Take-Off

I truly believe mobile apps will become the future of the internet (another reason why Twitter is becoming so successful). But more importantly, mobile apps that can be INTEGRATED across all platforms (yet again why Twitter is so successful). The technology is still very new and flawed so I don’t see it getting THAT big just yet. But 2009 is definitely going to be the year when it takes-off.

3. A New Tool To Help Us With Organization

The internet is overloaded with information. We are already getting information overload – RSS feeds, blogs, email, Twitter, Facebook etc. There needs to be a way to group these information into an organized manner. As Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said rightly in this video, right now Twitter is just a mess (when it comes to organizing the information). There needs to be a way to group tweets and filter out your friends in this noisy envirornment. And most importantly, we need friend synchronization – a way to connect all our friends, depending on your preferences, on the different social networking sites (Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) with just one click. Because right now, it’s just so hard to friend with people because they are everywhere. A big market here.

4. Videos – Interactive And Live Streaming

Video will continue to get bigger and bigger. Hopefully with the advancement in technology, we will begin to see more interactive videos (we’re seeing YouTube trying to achive that with their annotation feature) as well as better live streaming (again, we just saw YouTube do that with their recent YouTube Live event) with bigger bandwith.

5. Social Media Continues To Grow

Social media will become an integral part of the marketing campaign for all businesses in the future. Like Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said in this video, the future of Twitter is with marketers. e-Commerce, Business To Business will all start entering the social media arena. I wouldn’t be surprise if another social media site like Twitter pops up in 2009.

Your views for 2009? Leave a comment below

I’ll not be developing any more info products in the internet marketing niche in 2009… frankly because the IM niche is just too small and too “black hat”. I just feel that there’s too much BS and crap going on, many people just ripping people off by teaching them how to rip even more people off… it’s just like this sneaky little circle which I don’t like (there are obviously exceptions) .

So I’m creating a new magic site which I hope to launch in April – ProdigyMagic.com Hopefully, I’m going to do a better job documenting this venture than eMillions and hopefully continue updating my blog and provide you guys with great content.

What I’m currently trying to do is to get in touch with magicians in my school (apparently, there are a lot more than I previously thought), as well as try and get the BEST people (like video production, graphics etc) to get together a TEAM. Remember, business is a team sport.

Last night, I took about 2 hours of my time to whip out a splash page for it while I try and recruit people in my school. Please let me know what your feedbacks are. Thanks

I will be on a school camp next week, so please accept my apology if I don’t update my blog next week. Thanks.

Okay, the twitter case study is up. Over at my other blog:

http://www.emillionsblog.com/7-ways-to-get-1000-followers-on-twitter/

Yeah! Go follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/stanleytang

A blog post is coming tomorrow where I talk about ways you can boost your follower count. Watch out

That’s what Ted Nicholas said on the launch call for …

THE SIMPLEOLOGY GREAT TEACHERS SERIES: Ted Nicholas and Joe Sugarman Teach Direct Response Copywriting

I just had a look and I have to say …

I agree!

See for yourself:

http://www.stanleytang.com/recommends/copyspecial

Stanley Tang

So Lehman Brothers just filed bankcrupt.

Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy Monday and Merrill Lynch announced a rescue sale in a series of dramas in the US financial system which hit European stocks as soon as trading began.

The stunning fall of Lehman Brothers, one of the highest profile investment institutions, came after a frantic weekend marking a dangerous new chapter in the financial crisis sparked by failings in the subprime home-loan market.

And rumors has it AIG is next…

AIG asked the Federal Reserve for a $40 billion bridge loan after rejecting an offer from J.C. Flowers & Co. that would have given the buyout firm an option to acquire the whole company, the New York Times said, citing an unidentified person. AIG may get access to the Fed’s borrowing window in an “extreme liquidity scare”

It’s already desperately selling their assets, so there must be something going on. Things are going insane. I can’t imagine being in a world without AIG…

I’ve just posted some *excellent* content regarding how to create content using the power of interviews:

Part 1:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 1 of 6) – Why You Should Do Interviews

Part 2:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 2 of 6) – Finding The Experts

Part 3:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 3 of 6) – Getting The Expert Interviews

Part 4:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 4 of 6) – Coming Up With The Questions

Part 5:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 5 of 6) – Conducting The Interview

Part 6:
Instant Content Creation With Interviews (Part 6 of 6) – Packaging The Content

Bonus:
How To Write A Killer Interview Proposal (video)

Enjoy

Looks like Facebook just came up with a “new look”.

It doesn’t really suck, but I don’t exactly like it. That’s just my opinion. I much rather prefer the old look method. There are 3 things I dislike about it:

1. The profile page of your own now has the “What are you doing right now?” bar right in the middle (before, it was on the side). Looks like it’s trying to be like Twitter now.
2. The wall is “gone”. Its sort of mixed with the News Feed now.
3. It looks very “loose”. They removed the boxes and everything seems like its floating in midair. They’ve removed the facebook banner/logo at the top so it seems things are “squashed” towards the top.