• Business Insider, Thursday, January 5, 2012 12:09 PM

Echoing other Web pundits, Business Insider predicts that 2012 will be the year of the social curator. “Curation is what magazine editors do best -- but the move to online content has changed things a little … Now, users can do their own curation,” it writes. “As a result, the start-ups that are popular (Pinterest, Quora, and Fab) all have one thing in common: their users can curate content on the Internet.”

Pinterest, in particular, has seen its traffic skyrocket by 40x in the last six months. Elad Gil, director of corporate strategy at Twitter, sees the growth as a signal that Pinterest will change content on the Web. Essentially, Gil wrote on his blog, there's less friction to publish as we move from Blogger to Yelp to Facebook/Twitter to Tumblr to Foursquare to Path. As such, Gil envisions an evolution of blogging platforms turning into push-button publishing.

There's a move from stream-based consumption to a more organized form. Predicts BI: “This year, we can expect to see more Pinterest-type of sites popping up, where users can literally pin up what's interesting to them and have a place to bookmark it."

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