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.

I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape.  There's this massive change right in the middle, a new space that has to be filled, and then all these fissures spidering out from the main event where the rest of the world is affected by that event--new spaces that must be filled with something.

One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event.  It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created.  For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.

So here's the deal with Wave:  If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat.  And it's a big boat.  If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture.  Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code.  I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.

I try not to use words like that too loosely, either.

This banking system is dying.  I don't talk about it too much anymore because there's nothing that can be done to stop it at this point, but the Bretton Woods monetary system that has been in place since 1944 at the conclusion of World War II is coming to an end.  An interest-bearing debt based monetary system, which is what we have, has a finite life span from the moment it's born, and this one has reached its unsustainable peak and is on the way back down, fast.

It's sixth-grade math, you can't deny it, there is no wishing it away.  It just is.

So then, the question is what will rise as the next monetary system.  Never complain about me giving problems and not answers, here's a doozy.  I've been sketching these ideas out for several years now, and I've finally found a few other people who are thinking along the same lines.  If the current crisis has the end result of giving an alternative monetary system critical mass then it may be worth it.

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.

A post by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch today really got me riled up:  The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site.  This was up in the air until yesterday:

Yesterday, the SEC issued its formal cease-and-desist letter (embedded below or download PDF), outlining its reasoning for characterizing Prosper as a seller of investment, something prosper had vigorously resisted in the past by arguing that it was merely a marketplace matching lenders and borrowers. But the SEC is having none of that.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is an exact rerun of what happened with the original Napster and the music industry, only worse in my opinion.

The key here is that Prosper itself was not lending or borrowing, it was simply matching up willing borrowers and willing borrowers.  It also provided additional services such as collection and tracking.  The HORROR.

The real fact is, if private citizens were allowed to freely lend to one another, the private banking cartel that is our central banking system would lose the little control they have over the economy.  The free  market would freely set interest rates and people and businesses would be free to do an end-run around our corrupt and bloated financial system.  The financial engineering that has allowed Wall Street to siphon off trillions of dollars in profit at our expense would be crippled.  The SEC is simply acting as the enforcement arm of our private national banking cartel.

Don't fall under the protection of the cartel?  Goodnight, chump.

...is "How can this technology make me money?"

Notice that I say this is the question they must learn to answer, not what I personally am asking.  That's because there is no answer that will work for everyone asking the question, and I already know the answer for me.  People who want to evangelize this technology must learn to make the asker realize why this is not the correct question to ask.  As I said before, it's a mindset problem.

You also need an elevator pitch for this answer.  Something you can say in under 30 seconds.  If the answer takes more time than that you won't be able to sell it.

One of the questions I'm being asked somewhat frequently these days, probably because I write about it a lot, is "what can the Semantic Web do for this product/idea/whatever?"

My reaction is always a brief pause while I realize that the person asking the question doesn't really understand what it's about.  In the end, they're the one who has to figure that out.  The short answer is "it depends on what you're building".  It's like asking "What will learning how to read and write do for me?"  It depends on what you want to do with it, trying to ask somebody else is pointless.

I think this is ultimately a mindset problem.  Relational databases have placed limitations on software development that have been in place for so long that people aren't even conscious of them, they're just accepted.  Like the earth being flat.  Or the "fact" that  man cannot fly.  Software engineers have these limitations drilled into their heads from the time they're in high school until they graduate college, and then they perpetuate these ideas.  When a couple of guys sit around drinking a beer and drawing flowcharts on bar napkins, they have the limitations of a relational database in mind without even consciously thinking about it.

People think of the Semantic Web/Linked Data Web as something tangible and easy to point at, like rounded corners, or AJAX, or software that runs in a browser.  Or, more often than not, something "better than Google" in a nebulous kind of way.  It's not.

In my brain, I think of it as a direct replacement for relational databases.  This is from a programmer's perspective, of course.  I view it as something that you will plug in in place of the relational database that used to hold all of your stuff.  It is a means to let your applications use the Internet itself as its database.

I don't know what connections between your data and the outside world make sense, unless I'm involved in brainstorming the product.  But if you use a relational database you can't make any of those connections, they're precluded by your platform.  There's a ton of useful data out there for you to connect to, but it's up to you to figure out what you need.  You must know where you're going in order to get there.

To me, the Semantic Web is a fundamental shift in software architecture.  I've said this before, and I'm still convinced of it:  I will never build another application on a relational database, even if I don't plan to use any outside data.  Why would I consciously cripple my application?

UPDATE:  Kingsley has reminded me that there is indeed a line that needs to be drawn between the RDF store and the old relational database.  There is, already, middleware available that will facilitate mixing and matching RDF and relational databases in cases where the relational database is already entrenched.  I have corrected the flowchart :)

I've been playing with Twitter for the past few days on Trent Adams' recommendation.  Here's my profile.  I never really saw the difference between Twitter and a blog plus RSS, but he said there are some good conversations that happen there which you'll miss if you're not a part of it.  And, after a few days of play time I'm actually starting to enjoy it.

What it ends up being is a personal online chat room where you pick the participants.  You need a fat client, similar to a modified instant messaging client, or it's basically useless because you don't get the realtime updates, which kills the deal.  I use Twhirl.  There's a lot of noise (for example, I tweeted (twitted?) about how much the hotel coffee sucks this morning), but it's actually pretty cool when it works as an online conversation.  I see a lot of potential in this communication model for enterprise teams.

However, Twitter was not built as a chat platform using XMPP or any of the other actual chat protocols that are available.  It was built as a micro-blogging platform using a RESTful interface, and it does not lend itself well to scaling to a vast number of users bombarding it with requests for updates.  It goes down, a lot.  Just goes to show you that buzzword technology still needs to be applied judiciously.

Twitter is a perfect candidate to switch to an RDF back-end for publishing twits.  They could make this change in a week and while the clients wouldn't automatically switch over to SPARQL querying they'd at least have a scalable back-end going forward.

Oh, and I have no idea how they could possibly monetize this thing.  This type of service can not live forever as a private service, it can only work long-term in a distributed, decentralized model.  I have a feeling it's just a glimpse into the future of messaging.