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.

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.

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).

The Financial Times has an interesting article about how Web 2.0 startups have so far managed to generate a lot of buzz and behavior changes, but thus far very little in the way of actual cash.  This has been a constant wonderment to me for a long time, as it seems that people are looking for cool things and assuming it'll make money somehow down the road.  Like Twitter.

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

Don't get me wrong, I love many of the sites, and several of them I would actually pay money for if they asked.  But others I suspect will either be abandoned completely or scaled way the hell down.  Twitter is cool and all, but it really should be either open source or it should be somebody taking donations to do it.  Eh, I know I'm probably the only who thinks this, but it just doesn't add much value to me--it's more a diversion than anything.  (I'd be interested to hear if anyone out there would actually be willing to pay for Twitter?)  Maybe they could actually charge people to use it now that it has this many users, but I'd bet half their users would leave instantly. 

Advertising is getting to be pointless, it's so in your face on every Web site that people are numb to it.  It's also the lazy way out, where you add so little value to your users that the only way you can conceive to get money out of the interaction is to take advantage of the fact that they won't walk away from you.  It's like a street performer who juggles advertisements or something.

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.

Agreed.  With the economy screeching to a halt, these companies will need to start making real money, real fast.  The VC money will dry up.  They must either produce real value and get paid for it or take their ball and go home.  It will be interesting to see if the last few years are later seen as one big industry-wide "try before you buy" period.

(Sorry, I found that hilarious.  I don't mean to demean your favorite buzzword ;)  Found via Giles Bowkett, so go yell at him if you're offended :)

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.

In Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, he describes a certain class of people as “connectors”.  They’re people who know everyone, and thus are capable of spreading information and ideas quickly.  Social networks hint at leveraging these personal connections in digital form, but so far have failed to do much with it.

LinkedIn is the only application I’ve seen that really explores this idea from a social networking perspective.  Your network, the number of people you have access to, grows exponentially with each relationship you add.  And if you connect with one of those "connectors" your network will grow even faster (because you become connected to the people they know).

While it makes for an interesting interface and a fun way to explore social connections, LinkedIn--and all the other social networks I've seen--really don't do much with this connection data.  You can ask your network a question or see who’s hiring in your network, but it’s mostly just for ego gratification.

OpenID and FOAF change all that.  All of a sudden people become ACTUAL connectors, connecting together pools of meaningful, rich data that applications can use. 

Two applications which speak OpenID and FOAF all of a sudden have a common data element, a JOIN in SQL-speak.  It's possible because OpenID turns a person into a URI, which naturally lends itself to be used in FOAF.  FOAF is just a list of people, after all.

This is really cool stuff.  It’s automatic data integration across the Internet, using people as connectors. 

This is reason why Kingsley and a bunch of other people like to call the "Semantic Web" the "Linked Data Web".  Potayto-potato, it's all the same to me.  It’s cool, though.  It lets an application traverse the social graph to do its thing instead of being confined to its own network.  It allows an application on one network to access Person C’s data, on another network, by going from Person A to Person B to Person C, and then to their data.

I thought (still think) this was really cool when I finally understood it, and I don’t think many people have an appreciation for the opportunities this opens up.  Although, with the recent traction OpenID has been getting I think it's only a matter of time.

P.S.  This data integration using humans as connectors won't work via proprietary API's or microformats, by the way, because the enabling technology for this is SPARQL, which requires RDF to work its mojo.  Exposing proprietary API's means that you have to custom duct-tape together the data using middleware.

I admit it… I thought I got the semantic Web before, but I didn’t really.  I really got it just recently.

People have noticed that I haven’t blogged much (well, really not at all) for the past week. That's partly because I’ve been under some pretty tight deadlines at work lately, but also because I’ve also been feverishly working to fully grasp the semantic Web—not an easy task, for me at least.

Now that I’ve emerged on the other side of that process, the semantic Web seems like a pretty uncomplicated concept.  But boy, let me tell you, trying to wrap my brain around it was quite a challenge. I always knew what it was about from a high level—RDF, triples, vocabularies and all of that. I could just never mentally translate those ideas into solutions for the problems I was working on. And it’s interesting, because I can plainly see the vision now and, more importantly, how it fits into real-world problems.  I also see why it has been utterly failing at gaining any kind of traction outside of academia.

My little self-education process started when Kingsley Idehen invited me to a semantic Web get-together at MIT. We had emailed each other a few times before as a result of him finding my blog, and some posts I wrote about a year back about what is now being called data portability and distributed social networks. Since I’m now living in the Boston area, he invited me to MIT to meet in person and to get a sense of what the semantic Web ideas are truly about. The meeting was interesting, but I still came away unimpressed.

I kept in contact with Kingsley, peppering him with rapid-fire questions about semantic Web technology, technical details, and how it applies to my real-world problems, and he patiently answered all of my questions.  Thanks for the tutoring there man, appreciate it ;)  I thought I was pretty forward-thinking for writing about things like data portability and distributed social networks a year or two before they became hot stuff, but I now have to tip my hat to Kingsley and a few select members of the Semantic Web crowd and admit that they had this problem figured out back when I was still in college.

Now that I understand it, I realize that the semantic Web is some very, very cool stuff. It includes many of the ideas that I’ve been writing about for a long time without fully realizing that they were encapsulated by semantic Web ideas. Many of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while—data portability, being able to use objects distributed across the Web, global object identifiers, distributing software across networks, and using converged online identities—are achievable by the semantic Web, and pretty much all of the details have already been worked out. It was an epiphany for me when I realized this, and I have to say I’m extremely happy about it because I had been thinking that all of this was a new trail that had to be blazed. Turns out, all the heavy lifting has already been done, it’s just never really been used much.

I think the biggest problem the semantic Web is facing is the fact that most of the people who understand it come primarily from academia. Academia, to me, is plagued with a disease that I myself have suffered from my entire life—that is, the urge to build something just because it’s cool technologically, not because it’s useful in the real world. While something I built might impress the hell out of other computer geeks, and I’d be extremely proud of it, other people would look at it with mild interest and then quickly move on to something else, because they couldn’t see the value in it. I’d have to say that I owe a lot to the experience of building Latigent and to my former business partner Chris Crosby for helping me overcome that handicap. Having to build something with resale value in order to pay the bills this month has a way of grounding you in reality.  Having somebody else depending on you to build something of resale value, and remind you of that constantly, helps even more :)   I’d highly recommend every geek who thinks he’s hot stuff work closely with a sales-oriented person for a period of time if you really have a desire to make any money.

Besides suffering from being sold by people who don't really understand the real-world problems that it could fix, the semantic Web is plagued by a layer of jargon and terms that takes a significant investment of time to work through. While I understand that it’s important to clearly define what you’re talking about, people who are pushing the semantic Web are generally not very good at dumbing it down enough so that it’s easily palatable. It took me a good week of pretty focused research and having somebody there to bounce questions off of before I really got it--and I like to think that I'm a pretty technical guy. Now that I get it, I’m sure that there’s a better way to package these concepts so that more people understand how they relate to the problems they’re facing. The straightforward concepts that underlie the idea of the semantic Web are so obfuscated by the terminology and the W3C standards that come up when you google them that the mental barrier to entry is just way too high right now. The fact is, people will not adopt semantic Web ideas until semantic Web ideas are the ones that get returned when they search for a solution to their problem. In order to get to that point a radical change in the way these concepts are sold is needed.  That, and people like Kingsley, Danny Ayers, Tim Berners-Lee and others who are out there tirelessly promoting it as a real-world solution to real-world problems.

Kingsley has started calling the semantic Web the Linked Data Web, which is definitely a good step towards packing the idea in a more attractive way. I would personally prefer something more closely related to living, breathing objects (not literally, but in the sense that they can actually do things besides just being queried for data). I think that the semantic Web crowd is a little too focused on the data output side of things—all of the excitement seems to be around querying data, finding data, building a better Google, etc. That’s cool and all, but it seems to me that the real killer application for these ideas is allowing nodes on the Internet to find and then actually communicate with each other.  That key point almost seems lost in the shuffle to me. What is called the semantic Web today, with a nice healthy injection of service-oriented architecture, is going to be a revolution in computing. That's the bit that excites me—enabling an Internet where any node can communicate and interact with any other node on the network.

I'm looking forward to continuing to learn more about the details that have been painstakingly worked out over the years on the semantic Web, and at some point actually getting an opportunity to put them into practice.  I now have no doubt that the next earth-shattering applications, the revolutions in the way we use computers and the Internet, are going to spring from this movement, and I'm pretty excited about that.  All it needs is a little sex appeal and it'll catch on like wildfire.

One of my predictions for 2008 was that "Privacy and personal data ownership will be a critical issue for Web-based businesses."  Well, that didn't take too long.

Robert Scoble opened a can of worms today by testing a new Plaxo feature that scraped his contact list out of his FaceBook profile and importing it into Plaxo (and by doing so synchronizing his Outlook contact list, a pretty reasonable use of his FaceBook friend list if you ask me).  FaceBook banned him for using an automated script to suck out his contact data, and this has generated a flurry of blog posts debating who actually owns your contact data in a social network.

My kneejerk reaction is "duh".  You, obviously, own your contact list data.  However, there seems to be some controversy over whether FaceBook has a duty to "protect" its users' data from being scraped out by nefarious software.  The people making this argument no doubt also feel that the government needs to protect you from spending your money unwisely by taking it from you and spending it on $900 toilet seats.  This is a dumb argument.  If you establish a relationship with someone online, you are granting them some level of access to you.  The only logical reason for FaceBook NOT to want you to have access to your contact list is because... drumroll please... it makes your data portable.  It frees you to take your business elsewhere, and you can leave FaceBook unless it provides some kind of value proposition.  Poor FaceBook.  Is anyone else getting flashbacks to the MP3/RIAA/DRM controversy here or is it just me?

Anyway, I can now throw my full weight behind that prediction and say with some degree of certainty that 2008 will DEFINITELY be the year where you start to see personal data ownership and distributed social networks.  Efforts like dataportability.org and atmy.Name are going to force the issue whether sites like FaceBook and MySpace like it or not.  It's great to see this debate hit the mainstream, it's about time.  Plus, it helps my prediction success ration :)