Ten tech predictions for 2022: what?s next for Twitter, Uber and NFTs

Twitter has an unfortunate reputation as the punchbag of social media. It has failed to deliver the huge returns of bigger rivals such as Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, it hasn't been the cool new network for more than a decade and even its own most dedicated users love to drag it to oblivion.

Investors have been similarly wary of the 300m-strong social network - it has lagged behind rivals in terms of features, revenue per user and for monetisation tools. Lots of people rely on Twitter to make at least part of their income, but tend to monetise it off the network, with no cut for Twitter.

That might be starting to change. Twitter is trialling a "super follow" feature for people to support users they particularly like on the site, has bought the newsletter platform Revue and is integrating that with Twitter and has also bought up some other monetisation tools. With the departure of its part-time chief executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter might be worth a second look in 2022.

If you managed to avoid any mention of NFTs - short for non-fungible tokens - online in 2021, you spend your time in far less nerdy corners of the internet than we do. Non-fungible essentially means that one token isn't identical to the next one. So for a cryptocurrency, one bitcoin is no different from another bitcoin. For an NFT, each token is unique.

That means NFTs have become popular as a way to record blockchain "ownership" of a particular piece of digital art or memorabilia. These have included clips of NBA scoring shots, gorilla avatars and generative art.

Advocates say the ability to own digital art enables people to make ongoing creative work from the NFT they own, perhaps using it as the art for their company logo, adding it to existing intellectual property or even making a Gorillaz-style NFT avatar band.

Sceptics here note that all of this was and is possible without any use of NFTs at all: it is what intellectual property rights already exist to enable, after all. In practice, owning an NFT only proves you own the NFT - an entry on a blockchain somewhere saying you "own" whatever it links to. That may or may not be true legally, depending on how scrupulous the seller was.