Ok, time to man up, face the music, and see how I fared with my predictions for 2007 (from a little over a year ago). It sucks because I was REALLY close on a few of them, a few slid into 2008 by only a couple of days. Oh well, it is what it is… here we go.
- "RSS will gain mass acceptance". I could say that syndication has gained mass acceptance, since people are now pretty much used to following friends on FaceBook and Twitter, but then I screwed myself and said RSS, which itself is still pretty geeky (that’ll teach me to be specific when I make predictions
. Fail. - "Customized feed aggregators will become a vitally important tool for filtering and finding relevant information". This one is iffy too. I think this one is poised to catch on a little bit more in 2008 with the concept of Lifestreaming coming on hard, but the launch of tools such as Yahoo Pipes has made cutting and splicing feeds and building custom aggregators a pretty commonplace thing to do in the tech world. I’ll give myself a Pass on this one.
- "RSS and ATOM will continue to see more uses." You can pretty much get a feed on anything at this point, including people, so I’ll definitely give myself a Pass on this one.
- "’Realtime’ will be the buzzword of the year". Well, it kind of was, but not in the way I was expecting. The explosion of micro-blogging tools like Twitter meant that syndication was used in a much more realtime way, but I had intended this prediction to be about making realtime data available from closed systems. That didn’t happen. Fail.
- "Someone will develop a true meme-tracker", using semantic text analysis. Nope, surprisingly this didn’t happen either. Fail. (I now think that this will only happen via Semantic Web technology–which it will eventually.)
- "Identity theft will take on a new form: it will start to mean creating a false representation of someone else online." Well, this didn’t really happen. The only instance I can really think of this happening is with Fake Steve Jobs, but he came right out and admitted he was fake. I’m honestly pretty surprised this didn’t happen with the presidential race, it would be super easy to use guerrilla Internet tactics and misrepresent somebody online. Anyway, this didn’t pan out (that I know of)–Fail.
- "Content producers will start to realize that people are getting used to consuming entertainment directly from the Internet" I think I nailed this one. Internet entertainment is a no-brainer. Networks are starting to stream their shows from their Web sites, and Internet-only shows are popping up every day. Pass.
- "MySpace will become un-cool". While this definitely happened–FaceBook is now the place to be–I also said that I thought Orkut would take its place. Well, that did NOT happen. But it was a tanget to my larger prediction, so I’m going to give myself a Pass.
- "User data will be recognized as a priceless nugget of gold". Well, the beginnings of this materialized in 2007, but I can’t really say it got fully into the public psyche until Mr. Scoble had his little debacle with getting locked out of FaceBook for scraping his data out. I missed this one literally by two days (it happened on January 2nd if I remember correctly), but I’ll take my medicine. Fail.
- "Offshore hosting will become a major source of revenue in countries currently known for their secrecy in banking." This still intrigues me, but I have to admit it was a punt. Fail.
- "AJAX will be fleshed out and new development models will emerge that make the division between browser and server more seamless." While AJAX development toolkits have definitely continued to mature and become more sophisticated, the bit about being more seamless between browser and server didn’t materialize. I still have a grand scheme for this which I haven’t seen touched on anywhere else, but for now it remains locked in my head (and on this blog). Fail.
- "URI’s will become a universally accepted identifier for everything." Well this one was just dumb. Not in concept, but in timeframe; it was way too amibitious. It’s what the Semantic Web is all about (although I didn’t realize it at the time); I now think that this won’t happen for another 3 to 5 years. Fail.
- "Downloading and streaming media will start to gain mass acceptance as a content delivery channel" We’ve seen a lot of progress in this area with products such as Vudu, Apple TV, and NetFlix’s streaming service. I’d call it a good start. Pass.
- "Running applications in the cloud will be more cost effective than building out a data center." I don’t think this will be true until Amazon finally launches it’s SimpleDB service this year. Other grid computing services are still running rough. Fail.
- "The ability to run in the cloud will be one of the most important components of new projects". I guess you need the capability first eh? Fail.
- "Microsoft will continue to lose development platform market share." I must admit that I am too lazy to go do another development platform popularity contest (it was a lot of work!), and so I have no idea if this is true or not. My gut says it is, but I’m going to forgo grading myself on this one.
- "Apple will release an iPod with a touch-screen interface and I will buy it immediately." Pass. On both counts
Final score: 6 out of 16. Only 40%. Ouch. This year I resolve to make fewer predictions.
