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.

I'm on my way back to Boston after a great Thanksgiving with the family, and doing some reading catch-up on the plane.

One of the articles that I was really looking forward to reading was a new essay by Paul Graham (founder of the VC firm Y! Combinator), which is about (in a nutshell) the hidden cost of checks and balances--presumably the ones found in big companies--and I don’t agree with him at all.  This is the first essay of his that I haven’t been able to point at and say “yeah, he’s dead on with that.”  I thought he was going to discuss the finer points of skilled labor losing efficiency to time-consuming process (writing to startups like he usually does) but this post is directed to the companies who buy the startups' products. 

Instead of his normal sage advice to startups, this piece makes him sound like an apologist for poorly run startups.  I think his vision may be clouded by the current state of the economy.  I hope not by the economic state of the Y! Combinator startups, but I don’t think that can be ruled out given a glance at TechMeme on any given day.

The other day I was thinking about how trust is the exposed Achilles heel of the SaaS model: if the customer can't trust the service they're using with their confidential data, they won't use the service. This is a really big problem for startups in particular, because they have no brand equity to take advantage of. Getting new (and especially LARGE) customers to trust them is a pretty steep barrier to entry--especially for inherently confidential data such as financial data or M&A data. Then there's also the issue of the startup potentially failing and going out of business, and all the data built up in the application going "poof" along with it.

But the compartmentalized architecture that's becoming popular on the Web these days just may offer a solution. I've had some thoughts around this, and I've come up with a solution that would make me more comfortable storing my data with a startup that's an unknown quantity: Cloud Storage. While I haven't seen this model used very much at all yet, it makes a lot of sense to me and I can see it building some momentum over the next year or two.

Nova Spivack from Twine wrote an interesting post over at Read/WriteWeb about the future of the desktop which I'd like to comment on.  It really ties in nicely with what I've been thinking about recently around user interfaces, especially since any hardware innovations will necessarily involve an ACTUAL operating system.

I agree 100% with Nova when he says that everything is moving to the cloud.  SmugMug lets me store my high-res photos in my own Amazon S3 store, Jungle Disk lets me back up everything else to the cloud.  Storage is, for me, a monthly utility expense (and last month it only cost me $3.18, so for me this is much cheaper than hard drive space, backup, backup tapes, tracking everything, and worrying).

There have been some really interesting developments and concepts in the human-computer interface area recently.  This is one of my favorite areas of technology to play with.  It's just plain fun and I can't think of another area where the future is available for several years before it hits the mainstream market.  Plus, there's just something exciting about trying to bridge the virtual and the real. I own a 3D glove, VR goggles, and the first commercial multi-touch interface.  If we had the room I'd love to get a virtual reality ball to play with :)

"Unified communications" is one of the hottest buzzwords I've seen in a while.  Everyone is jumping onto the unified communications (UC) bandwagon these days:  Cisco, Microsoft, and several small players have all got the UC religion.  And, I believe, Apple and Google are sneaking in the back door.  It's interesting because I can literally see the buzz growing around this in real-time.  Google's starting to send a substantial amount of traffic to my blog from UC-related queries, and I now belong to a LinkedIn group and a Google Group focused solely on UC.

However, the definition of UC still seems fuzzy.  Depending on who's using it, it can mean:

• Using the same network for voice, video, and data, or...
• Using the same device for all forms of communication, or...
• Mixing media types (audio + video + data combo) in the same stream of communication

And there are probably other definitions as well.  In fact, I think unified communications is in danger of becoming a fuzzy buzzword just like Web 2.0 is--its definition can be changed to suit your immediate purpose.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, fuzzy buzzwords seem to have a way of being what people want them to be, so they can be good from a marketing perspective.  Position yourself as a leader in UC and you're a leader in just about anything you can label as UC.  But it also makes it tricky to craft a coherent strategy, because a strategy implies definition and measurable goals and numbers to meet and so forth.  Anyone care to identify a measurable goal around a Web 2.0 strategy?  (Thought not.)

In my opinion, Microsoft was the first with a truly unified communication product with Exchange, which unifies your calendar, contact list, and inbox.  Lotus has similar functionality, although the database features of their product get in the way of a clear marketing direction.  GroupWise is also in this space to some degree.  But all are primarily fat client and none have any concept of a mobile platform.  There's also not much in the way of voice or video there, although Microsoft is starting to address that.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on converging communication channels, but not enough on the user experience.  I would argue that if there isn't a benefit to the end-user all you're doing is commoditizing the pipes that carry the information.  That's nice because it brings significant cost savings, but then you're competing on the cost of bits and bytes.

The real interesting and somewhat neglected aspect of unified communications is at the end user.  While communication is starting to flow over a single channel, the user experience is still very fragmented.  I counted 7 distinct products on Microsoft's UC Roadmap.  If you have to stick it together with duct tape is it still Unified?

I'm probably in the minority here, but I see unified identity as the linchpin to unified communications, and I see Apple taking the early lead here.  Microsoft, while they have yet to unify their customer experience, gets this identity bit in the enterprise space--it's the basis of Active Directory.  But Apple, they get it in the consumer space.  Mobile Me is a big deal, it's Apple's foray into the UC space starting from the identity up.  (Don't forget that Apple has existing patents on the iPhone to enable video conferencing!)  Notice how they bill Mobile Me as "Exchange for the rest of us".  I've been saying for years that the first company to launch an Exchange clone for the common man will make money hand over fist.  When my friends and family first saw my Blackberry and all the cool things it could do they thought it was REALLY nifty.  They can have it now with Mobile Me.  (RIMM is effectively dead, by the way... unless they pull a BIG old rabbit out of their hat.)  Bringing this capability to Joe Public is going to create some interesting changes in the market as consumers get used to a unified communications experience and start to demand change when they see an experience that's inherently fragmented.  The line between enterprise and consumer is going to blur whether enterprise companies want it to or not.

Apple and Microsoft both have their weaknesses in this space, and they're related to being closed and locking users in.  Mobile Me is not open--like everything else from Apple it's closed and controlled.  Fine.  It's better than what we had before outside of the enterprise (nothing).  Exchange is also tightly controlled, but it's from a licensing perspective.  The most they've done to open up Exchange in all of the years it's been available is to host Exchange on the Web recently.  Microsoft is clinging tightly to the family jewels, and while they do that they're leaving the window open for new and hungry competitors to boot them from the top of the mountain.  Now, if they were to open a consumer-facing Exchange-based competitor to Mobile Me, THAT would be a big deal.  However, they'll never do it because Exchange is such a cash cow for them.  (If I were Ray Ozzie I'd bake Exchange into the next version of Windows--it might already be too late, but it's worth a shot.)

Google, I think, is a wild card here.  They certainly have the beginnings of a UC product line.  With a Google account I can now get email, chat, instant messaging, and voice chat.  And I use their GrandCentral product to front-end all of my voice communications because I love the way it ties in with my contact list and acts as a virtual personal assistant.  The key will be what they end up doing with their mobile Android operating system.  If they manage to get traction with that it could be an interesting way to both unify the communications experience and, eventually, penetrate the enterprise. 

There seems to be a unified communications "stack" emerging here, and I don't think any player addresses the whole thing yet.  You have the device, which Apple owns at a consumer level (barring an Android revolution) and is completely fragmented at the enterprise level (Microsoft is pushing the desktop--ick--and everyone else is pushing devices).  Then there's the identity layer, which Microsoft owns in the enterprise but Google and Apple are starting to break into from the consumer side.  And then there's the network, which everyone owns.  (It is interesting that Google recently tried to purchase wireless spectrum, to me this implies that they're trying to own the entire stack.)

The real question, I think, is whose vision is the most ambitious and most aligns with the future.  I have big doubts about Microsoft, they're stuck trying to defend the desktop which is a losing proposition in the long run.  I'm just speculating about what Google is doing.  But I was really impressed when I saw Steve Jobs unveil Mobile Me a few months ago, it really shows Steve Job's vision.  My reaction was "he really gets it".  It'll be interesting to see how each of these visions pan out.  Gentlemen, place your bets!

P.S.  I'm not going to comment on Cisco's strategy because I'm not sure what I legally can and can't say--so I just stay away from it.

Working at Cisco is a new experience for me, as far as the size of the company.  Prior to Cisco the largest company I worked for was around 5000 people.  Lately I have been thinking of the advantages of being a big, well-known company, and how those advantages can be leveraged in new ways.  I have found that there are many things a startup can do that a larger company simply cannot because of size, but there are opportunities larger companies have to leverage their brand which are closed to smaller companies.

The one thing that a startup can't duplicate is company brand and history.  Brand equates to automatic relationships and trust, especially from a business perspective.  There's a certain amount of latitude and respect that you get automatically when people recognize and respect the brand of the company you're working for.  That's been a very interesting thing to observe at Cisco.

There's one use case for this trust that I haven't seen explored much:  Cross-business social analytics.  Daydreaming about this, I can see some very interesting opportunities for a trusted intermediary to become a clearinghouse for metrics and industry insight.  By having access to individual companies' data and being trusted not to share it, competitor data could be aggregated and individual companies could compare their metrics against the industry average, without anyone's data being exposed.  The only thing required is that each of the individual companies trust the clearinghouse with their data.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly useful to see how my company's issue resolution rate compared to my competitors, what my conversion rate is compared to the industry average, etc.  By consolidating this over time you could even look at industry trends against your individual metrics etc.

It would be interesting to see how open companies are to this.  If it was actually successful I can see several interesting offshoots such as the clearinghouse becoming a "credit rating agency" for the industry, providing reports that verify that the company is in fact in the Top 10% for a given metric against the industry.

The one real drawback I can see is companies might become excessively metric-driven.  For example, if software development managers started comparing a BS metric like lines of code to the industry average, that would be an extremely bad thing.

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.

The Web is still in its infancy.  It sounds like an absurd claim, except that the person making it is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web in the first place.  I happen to agree with him.

The first incarnation of the Web changed the world, and what we call "Web 2.0" was only an incremental improvement on that.  It made the baby-Web usable for normal people.

I've had the pleasure of speaking with Tim on a few occasions and he is patiently waiting for everyone to get over the love-fest with what they currently know as the Web so we can focus on moving things forward and innovating again.

The end-game here, and what Tim has had in mind from the beginning, amounts to a completely new paradigm in software.  It's about creating an Internet-wide mesh of data which a given software application can use as easily as its own database. 

Fortunately, the Web is hurtling towards adolescence.  SPARQL is the glue that makes this global data mesh usable, and it was just ratified this year.  The Web's voice just cracked.

While advances like service-oriented architecture were steps in the right direction, they were still just an incremental improvement over client-server based architectures.  And as useful as that is, I think an unfortunate side-effect is that an entire generation of programmers was raised with their thinking firmly locked in the old paradigm.  I've tried to evangelize the new paradigm myself, and I can attest that it's like trying to convince people that man can actually fly using airplanes while they turn around and go back to work on pimping out their horse and buggy.

Tim's vision of the Web is the ultimate logical evolution of Web technology.  Fortunately there are some recent developments that indicate that the Web has hit a growth spurt and we may soon see another explosion of innovation based on the Next-Generation Web.