When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

Um, that should really be Reporting ON the Future, but I thought this title was cooler :)

Anyway, what was the last thing you got really technically geeked out about?  (I'd really actually like to know, if you feel like sharing.  I dig stuff people are excited about.)

I mean, what was the last thing you saw that really made you say "wow, this is really going to change things"?

I haven't had one of those moments in a while but I'm learning something now that has me feeling that way.  You know, when you start thinking of the potential implications and it just takes things to a whole new level.

This idea actually build on my last hot trend for 2009, Risk Aversion.

When you can't trust anyone else with your money, the one thing you can invest in, with certainty, is yourself.

When people get laid off, they have a choice.  They can either sit on the couch and wait for a job to come along (they'll be waiting a LONG time), or they can invest in themselves and their own personal brand and create opportunities for themselves.

Simply because of the fact that many very bright people are being laid off right now, and will continue to be laid off throughout 2009, I believe we'll see an uptick in people investing in themselves.  This can take several forms:

• Self-education, which is free for the most part, resulting from more reading and personal investigation.  Included in this category are laid-off software developers contributing to open-source efforts, etc.
• Back to school.  I can see junior college enrollment going way up as people go back to school to learn a new trade or career.  (Conversely I can see 4-year college enrollment tanking as they are spectacularly overpriced right now, and there are a ton of recent graduates with $100k+ student loans crying in their beers)
• Entrepreneurship:  when you know how to do something well, there's no better investment than selling your skills directly.
• Starting Web sites:  starting a Web site like a blog or a niche informational site is a great way for people to expand their network and their brand.  But it does requires a SIGNIFICANT amount of time, time which most people aren't willing to invest in normal circumstances.

Personally I think this is a great thing.  Forcing people out of their comfort zones may not be the most pleasant thing for those people, but there's a big opportunity here for people to grow and actually come out of 2009 in a better position than they came in.

Also, I'm looking forward to a more educated populace; hopefully it won't put up with all the BS being sprayed across the country from Washington

One of the major themes for the new year will be risk aversion.  Not just your plain vanilla variety risk aversion but quaking-in-your-boots-run-for-the-hills style outright fear of risk.

Over recent years risk appetite has gone parabolic, people being willing to take on more and more risk and throwing caution to the wind.  Unfortunately, they haven't been adequately compensated for the risk they've taken on, and now they're being forced to eat the costs.  Instead of being wary of risk, investors simply assumed that they could repackage it, put lipstick on it, and pass it on to the next sucker.  This mindset was epidemic and permeated every level of our society.

Charles Ponzi, eat your heart out.

The mania of eternal growth and expansion made any talk of risk management sound old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy, and outdated--and now we're paying the price.  Billions of dollars were thrown at investments which, in retrospect, will look like absurd wastes of time.

The pendulum will, of course, now swing too far in the opposite direction before risk appetite re-appears.  People and businesses are going to hunker down and go into hiding this year.  Risk aversion is going to be evident in every facet of our lives: 

• Banks will be very risk averse, which will contract our ability to obtain credit and the ability of small businesses to obtain business loans.
• Investors will be very risk averse, which will stifle the ability of large businesses, states, and cities to obtain credit by selling bonds.
• Startups will have an incredibly hard time finding funding, and when they do find money available the cost will be guido-like.
• Expect to see a sharp uptick in try-before-you-buy and product trials, especially for expensive products.  Show me the money!
• Unproven companies will find it very difficult to get in the door at new customers, who will recently have been burned by long-time vendors going out of business.
• Risky projects with iffy ROI's will be canned left and right.  I'll call this the trail of bodies left behind after the Web 2.0 tsunami recedes back into the ocean.
• People who still have jobs will stay in them, reluctant to give up a steady paycheck to start a business or take a gig with a risky startup.
• Expensive projects will be put under the microscope and their ROI's gone over with a fine-toothed comb.  "Soft" benefits don't count now.
• I will even go so far as to say that risk aversion will become "cool".  It will be "cool" to be safe and conservative.  Conservative cars, conservative clothes, safe movies and music.  Pimp your safety.  Say good-bye to bling and flash, risk aversion is going to permeate our culture.  Nun habits are in this year (kidding ;)

This risk-averse mindset really didn't start taking hold until October of this year, and everybody is still relaxed from their forced Christmas vacation.  I wouldn't be suprised to see a brief honeymoon while Obama takes office (the "Hope Halo"), but earnings season in the March timeframe is going to throw gallons of freezing cold water on everybody and force them to wake up.

Happy New Year!

Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

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.

Chrismas is over, and it's officially 2008.  Wow, this was really a fast one for me.  Between getting married, selling Latigent to Cisco, moving to Boston, and getting acclimated to life at Cisco, I barely time to stop and breath.  But I had a couple of days to relax and collect my thoughts over Christmas and, as I like to do every year, I've put together a list of my predictions for 2008.  So, without further ado, my predictions for 2008:

1. The recession (that we are already in the beginning stages of if you look at the data instead of listening to the pump monkeys on CNBC) will make 2008 a slow and cautious year.  Budgets will shrink and new projects will be put on standby as the US and world economies slow as a result of the global credit market going into further gridlock.
2. After a horrific year in 2007 the dollar will rebound a bit, making outsourcing a hot ticket item once again (as it gets cheaper).  This will happen because the rest of the world will get hit even harder than we will by the recession.  US companies that are counting on international business to prop up their bottom lines will be severely disappointed as exports become more expensive to foreign customers and international budgets shrink as well.  Many (more) CEO’s will lose their jobs.
3. On the bright side, the Internet’s effect on politics will be one of the biggest stories of the year.  If you thought Howard Dean was an interesting story because of the way he used the Internet to coordinate and attract support, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Ron Paul’s supporters have coordinated themselves to the tune of over $6 million in 24 hours, and this will continue to be an interesting story to watch throughout the presidential race.  The floodgates are open and Old Media is no longer the gatekeeper.
4. Google will attempt to integrate its Orkut social network into its iGoogle/Google Docs businesses.  Last year I predicted that MySpace would become un-cool and Orkut would take its place.  Well, I was right on half of that--in 2007 FaceBook became the new hip online hangout, but Orkut only gained popularity overseas.  Google recently announced that they’re fleshing out the profile aspect of their Google accounts, and it only makes sense to me that they will eventually integrate their Orkut social network with their Google accounts/iGoogle/Google Docs products.
5. Online identity will become a prominent issue, and OpenID will benefit.  Will 2008 be the year when we see the first high-profile online identity theft?  I don’t know, but I know that it will happen sometime soon.  As soon as someone famous loses control of their online identity you will see this become a VERY hot issue.  It may be the first time you see a search engine optimization specialist interviewed on the evening news :)
6. FaceBook will *start* to lose market share to emerging distributed social networks that will be born in 2008.  2007 was the year of FaceBook, primarily because they started opening up their platform and this created a flood of interesting applications.  But there’s only so far a fundamentally closed system can open up before it risks letting outsiders cannibalize its revenue stream.  I think FaceBook has already reached that point, and that opens up the door for more open systems to come in and gain market share.  OpenSocial is a step in the right direction, and the work being done around personal data portability is only going accelerate this shift.
7. Privacy and personal data ownership will be a critical issue for Web-based businesses.  As businesses start hitting the limit of what a strict advertising-based revenue model will allow (see above), they will test the limits of their users’ patience by mining user data and selling that data.  They will push and push until they find the line that they cannot cross.  FaceBook Beacon was just the first example of this phenomenon.  Either businesses will hold their users’ interests above all else, including profit, or they will slowly compromise their users in order to extract more money from them.  If history is any indication—and it usually is—we can expect them to compromise their users’ privacy.  This will bring the first users to distributed social networks.
8. Google will attempt to diversify its revenue streams.  You can already see this beginning with Google’s push into content with its Google Knol product.  Right now Google is a one-trick pony—it makes revenue from advertising.  It wants more, obviously, such as ALL of the advertising revenue on the content side.  In order to justify its insane stock valuation it will need to come up with a ways to collect a LOT more revenue.  The trick here is going to be coming up with new revenue streams that don’t cannibalize and piss off the ecosystem that has developed around it.  If Google starts competing with the content producers, content producers will start loving and promoting somebody else.  Once that happens, Google is no longer the unquestioned King of Search--content producers will start optimizing their sites for more profitable search engines, and the monopoly will start to crumble.
9. Companies with no sustainable long-term revenue streams (ie, companies whose main attraction is becoming commoditized and turned into features on other sites) will be sold while they can still get big money for them (they had better move fast, before belts start tightening).  This includes Twitter and Digg.  Rupert Murdoch may be tempted to add to his collection of terminally ill businesses (see:  MySpace, Wall Street Journal)
10. Mobile applications will become increasingly Web-based, perhaps hooking into OpenSocial-type API’s provided on the client device to offer a more seamless experience.  The iPhone and iPod Touch (one of the predictions I hit on last year) really opened the floodgates here as they’ve shown that Web applications can actually be usable on a mobile device.  WAP, R.I.P.
11. Cloud/grid computing will continue to develop and gain market share.  If Amazon can flesh out its SimpleDB service to be a bit more relational and analytics friendly it could put a serious dent in the small business database server market.  Experience with utility computing will be one of the hottest resume bullet points of 2008 (and every year thereafter).
12. You will see more content producers choosing to bypass distribution channels and take their products directly to the consumers.  I predicted last year that the NFL network would start doing this, and they have.  They’re now showing exclusive games on their network, and also streaming games off of their Web site.  Look for more high-profile consumer entertainment products to follow suit as trailblazers like the NFL Network show that you don’t need an expensive distribution channel to make money.

That’s it for this year--I feel pretty good about these predictions actually coming to fruition in 2008.  Whatever happens, it should be an incredibly interesting year, it feels like we’re on the cusp of some revolutionary new developments in the personal online space in particular.  As long as the recession doesn’t derail everything, that is :)

On the resolution side of things, I started a low-carb diet today to drop the Christmas poundage, I'm picking up last year's resolution to become ambidextrous, and I'm also resolving to blog more frequently.  Until Christmas I was of the impression that 2008 couldn't POSSIBLY be as eventful for me as 2007, until we found out at my wife Jessica is pregnant, so there goes that idea.  But, I'm still shooting for a good success ratio!

There’s been a pretty fascinating discussion going on in the blogosphere recently about the benefits and hazards of centralization on the Internet.  Three main hot button topics have come and have ignited the discussion:  TechMeme, TinyURL, and FaceBook.

If you’re not familiar with TechMeme, it’s a site that aggregates blog posts around a particular topic (meme) and creates “conversations” around them.  It’s pretty popular among the Web 2.0 crowd and many people—myself included—tend to use it as a tech newspaper.  It’s really handy in that regard, because you can see when there’s a popular topic that’s getting a lot of coverage without having to subscribe to thousands of feeds.

On the other hand, the way TechMeme aggregates the posts is something of a mystery.  It’s unclear whose blogs are on its “reading” list (my blog is part of the mix, and I’m not exactly sure how it got there), and they seem to be giving a lot more traffic to the big corporate blogs such as CNN, CNET, and TechCrunch lately. People are complaining that this is killing genuinely new and innovative memes off the site, and I tend to agree.  It used to be an incredibly interesting site to read because you’d see all kinds of offbeat and obscure ideas that you would otherwise never have heard of.  Recently it’s been more along the lines of technology news commentary, which is a real shame.  I would almost rather see the site broken up into an “A List” and “B List” site, I’d probably pay much more attention to the “B List” version.  But the point is that the one site having the power to decide which blogs are important, and thereby which memes are important, seems to be hurting the diversity and egalitarianism that made blogs interesting in the first place.  It’s a single point of failure in the brainstorming business.

And then there’s TinyURL.  Most people are probably familiar with it—but if you’re not it’s just a service that will take a long, obtuse URL and shorten it into a URL of about 15 characters.  It’s become more popular recently thanks to the micro-blogging phenomenon using sites like Twitter which let users post extremely small blog posts.  Usually the posts are limited to about 200 characters, so if you want to embed a link in your Twitter post, TinyURL is a handy little tool to help save space.

The downside, as with TechMeme, is that TinyURL is a single point of failure.  It went down the other day, and all of a sudden many, many links stopped working.  It poses the question of whether using any single point on the Internet as a conduit for so much traffic is actually a good idea, even if it makes life a little easier.  (I also have questions about where the Google juice for TinyURL’s go, to TinyURL itself or the destination site.)

And then there’s privacy—the big 500-lb gorilla hiding in the corner.  People are starting to have concerns about what Facebook and other social networks are doing with their data.  I’ve been blowing this horn for so long I’m starting to get tired, and the only way around this roadblock is to actually OWN OUR OWN DATA (duh).  IMO trying to fix the companies themselves is just a band-aid--just like tamed lion, even the most trustworthy companies can turn on you at any time ("Don't be evil" comes to mind here).  Of course, if you willingly give a company your data, they will use it to make the most money they can.  If you don't like it, you should rethink capitalism.  Don’t try to fix the companies, fix the freaking paradigm.  This is one area that needs decentralization in a bad way.

What I think is interesting is to watch this dance back and forth between centralization and decentralization.  For every two steps we make towards decentralization, we take a step backwards towards centralization.  What starts out decentralized ends up centralizing for a time in the name of progress and convenience, until the centralized systems are shattered into a million pieces as necessity and self-preservation demands it.  Technology innovation tends to happen in one spot (company, site, community, etc), and shortly afterwards that one spot becomes a centralized hub for all activity around that innovation.  Until it’s not.

This whole discussion leads to another fascinating topic, one that I think is going to be the defining trend in the next phase of Internet evolution:  personal Internet ownership.  It’s the ultimate level of decentralization, decentralizing the Internet so that it operates on the basis of each individual person, not relying on these central hubs we have today, like social networks and Old Media outlets.  Taking the Internet’s server network and turning it into a human network.

It’s always fun to try to predict how technology will evolve in the future.  Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong--but usually only in terms of timeframes.  Even the most outlandish predictions end up coming true eventually.

I believe that one of the milestones of the next phase of Internet evolution will be the mass realization that there is no fundamental difference between different types of messages, except for the way they are transmitted.  A message is a message is a message.  Emails, voicemails, phone calls, text messages, blog posts, podcasts, and instant messages—they are all just packets of information at their core, after you strip away the chrome.  Programmers are very familiar with this concept, most other people are not—yet.

This idea is making its way towards mass comprehension though, thanks to services like Twitter, GrandCentral, and the iPhone (ok, so the iPhone isn’t a service, just bear with me…).  These services blur the lines between instant messages, blog posts, and text messages by making them almost interchangeable.  They generate buzz solely for the reason that they allow people to use some types of messages in ways that were previously only available to other types of messages.  (For example, Twitter simply allows people to use blog posts in a way more traditionally associated with instant messaging and text messaging, and it’s generated an insane amount of hype.)

The reason why I think this idea is so key to the next phase of Internet evolution is because there is so much value to be had from handling all types of messages in the same way.  The iPhone generated alot of buzz because it allows its users to manage their voicemails in the same way they manage their emails, using a visual inbox format (GrandCentral allows you to do the same thing, as I noted in my review earlier).  But ALL types of messages should be handled this way, in my opinion.  Then just marry a feed reader like Google Reader with this universal inbox system and they will make a baby that generates more buzz than you’ve ever seen--a true mobile identity platform.

But the real reason this excites me is because as people begin to handle all forms of messages in the same way, using the same system, this will lead to a more cohesive and unified concept of online identity.  As messages start to be seen as more of a nebulous blob of information, and less of a “text message”, or “voicemail” or “email”, people will start to realize that they *should* be able to handle and manage them in an efficient manner, regardless of what type of message it is.  We're just reaching this point now with the recent evolution in voicemail handling systems.  This will eventually lead to a greater appreciation of and need for a universal message inbox, a unified contact list, and eventually a converged messaging identity.  They will realize that there is no good reason why they can’t use the same identifier/identity for all of these different types of messages .  A converged messaging identity turns every person on the network into a network node, resulting in a true network of human beings.

I’ve been forecasting an eventual converged/consolidated online identity system for well over a year now, and I’m starting to see the first hints of it actually happening now with releases like Twitter, GrandCentral, and the iPhone.  I truly believe that it’s only a matter of time before people demand it, as their level of technological sophistication rises.  The bits and pieces of technology that are a part of this evolution are starting to float to the surface and gain visibility, if not mass acceptance.  Only time will tell how far off I am on the timing of these developments.