This wasn't one of those years.
Instead, 2011 will likely be remembered as a year of incremental upgrades in various social media platforms. This was not a year like 2006, in which Twitter was introduced, or 2009, when the world first got a glimpse of Foursquare. The big new launch of 2011 may be Color, a company that got "$41 million in funding for nothing," in the words of David Berkowitz, VP of emerging media with 360i, a digital marketing firm.
Ian Schafer, CEO of digital agency Deep Focus, says 2011 was a year in which "roots grew deeper" in social media, but nothing fundamentally changed. "It was less 'What's the next Facebook?' and more 'What's Facebook gonna do next?'" he says.
All of which is not to say that those incremental improvements weren't significant. Some of the changes listed below could pan out to be key inflection points in the history of social media marketing. Most will not, though, and will be about as memorable as the average tweet.