Looking back to London 2012 - and how it helps us to glimpse a tech future

On the one hand, it’s hard to take in that the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics was 10 years ago today.

On the other hand, so much has happened in those 10 years that, honestly, I could almost believe we were marking the 20-year anniversary of those magical Olympics.

London 2012 had been my focus for years. I was responsible for planning BBC Sport’s digital coverage of London 2012 and then, in late 2011, I was offered the opportunity to plan Twitter’s approach to the same event, as the first Head of Sport for Twitter UK and Twitter’s first sports hire outside the US.

I don’t think it’s my personal bias to suggest that both BBC Sport and Twitter were central to the digital experience of those Olympics. I was - and still am - proud of that.

10 years on, it’s fair to say both those brands are still just as relevant. Both are constantly questioned - but consistently prove their value to the sports industry in the UK.

Last night was a good example - the England women’s team’s Euro 2022 semi-final was watched by 9.3m people on BBC One and 2m on iPlayer or the BBC Sport website/app. The second-screen conversation on Twitter was buzzing.

We were partying like it was 2012 last night - except it would’ve been hard in 2012 to imagine the women’s Euros on the front page of every newspaper, for today at least the biggest sport in the country. Progress indeed.

It’ll be the same on Sunday for the final, which will probably be the most watched women’s football match in the UK ever (currently that record is 11.7m for the 2019 World Cup semi-final, when the USA beat England). Once again, all of us will experience that event on two screens - the big one in front of us, and the smaller one in our hand, which is by now essential to our experience of any major event.

But it’s 2022 not 2012, and whilst women’s football is unquestionably on the way up, there are suggestions that social media is on the way down.

It’s been a tough month for the sector. Snap’s share price fell after its lowest-ever quarterly sales growth. App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is being blamed in part for that - and is also impacting Meta, especially Facebook. Instagram meanwhile has had quite the week with Adam Mosseri having to publish a video addressing concerns about Instagram, after being called out by arguably its most famous users.

In summary: some are suggesting we’ve reached “the end of the social networking era.”

My view: it’s too early to make that claim, but things are changing fast, and the next two years will tell us whether Meta and other web2 giants make it out of this dip, and if so, in what shape.

2024 is the next US Election. As I have said many times before, US Elections change tech. Consistently. Fundamentally.

That was the case in 2012, the same year we all celebrated the London Olympics. And again in 2016 (spectacularly so) and in 2020.

That’s because US Elections have a unique blend of three factors:

• They’re a major consumer interest event, just like an Olympics, so they attract users and, therefore, advertisers
• Obviously, they’re of particular interest to politicians and regulators, so anything that can determine the outcome of the election comes under scrutiny, including tech platforms
• They happen in the world’s biggest consumer market which also happens to be the market where most of the platforms are based

All signs point to the story of social media in 2022 being Meta vs TikTok.

My prediction: this battle reaches its endgame two years from now when the US Election reshapes the tech landscape as it always does.

But with a twist - whilst the Elections of 2020, 2016 and 2012 profoundly shaped the Web2 landscape, 2024 might be its endgame.

In other words, whilst I think it’s early to call this month the end of the social networking age, I do think we have entered a two-year skirmish that will close out Web2, and determine the winners and losers of a 20-year era of tech that started when Mark Zuckerberg first built a website called The Facebook.

In the context of that 20-year tech era, TikTok reaching The Final (so to speak), where it will meet the mighty Meta, represents a stunning come-from-behind story.

On the opening night of London 2012, 10 years ago, nobody was sitting in the Olympic Stadium capturing the moment on TikTok. That’s for sure. Yet, here we are now.

TikTok’s genius has been to move us away from social networks that are built on follower and friend relationships. It showed us that, if an algorithm was able to keep showing us content we loved, we wouldn’t care which accounts it came from and whether we knew them or not. That required an algorithm smart enough to figure out exactly what we wanted to see, and a userbase big enough to create enough of that content for the algorithm to find.

Does TikTok have the userbase and the algorithm? Better believe it. To the point where the entire user experience of Instagram is changing to react to the threat.

TikTok hasn't just competed with other social media apps. It's changed what we consider social media to be. In less than 5 years. Breathtaking.

So, two years left of Web2? What’s next? Especially when some people are keen to declare Web3 dead on arrival.

The answer is yet to play out. Web3, like it or not, is happening, because we’re seeing new technologies which simply weren’t part of either of the first two eras of the web. Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs and Crypto have all entered the group chat. We just haven’t yet figured out how most people will use them.

Sometimes we have to look back, to be able to see forwards. London 2012 feels like a long time ago. Facebook and Twitter were the big two. The stories of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok were mostly yet to be written. Looking back, that night of the Opening Ceremony wasn’t just a magical moment for many of us in the UK sports industry, but also the midway point of a tech era - Web2.

And yet, the app which is now so powerful that it’s re-drawing our experience of social media, and the products of its competitors, was nowhere at that point. Eras of tech are long - 20 long years of insane development and competition. Only the foolish or the hasty would claim to know the winners and losers of web3 in these earliest days.?

But we do know that the technologies created over the next several years will determine how we experience Olympics - just as Twitter was central to 2012. I think we’ll have an early sense of this by Paris 2024, and almost certainly by Los Angeles 2028.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to go and watch some clips from the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. Which makes me think, how good would it be to experience that event all over again but this time, from different vantage points in the stadium. Almost like … a Metaverse view. Now there’s a thought …