2008 Predictions: Internet and Social Media

It is traditional. Writing some predictions for 2008. I’m going to focus on the Internet, social media and associated technology.

Google Search: Trust

I think 2008 will be the year when we’ll realize that we can’t have search being a closed algorithm any more. I get the feeling that it is going to be just too easy for a couple of folk at Google to work out how to pervert search a tiny bit and make a couple of billion extra in revenue. Given that you can do that, it is going to happen eventually, isn’t it, despite the ‘Do No Evil’ thing, which is just sounding more and more defensive these days.

Time to dust off that wikia vision of open search and get moving on it. Ooooh look, the are launching something on Jan 7th. We’ve only got the one Internet, and it would be a pity if we lost trust in our search results.

Also, I’ve always been really uneasy about the whole SEO thing. It feels to me like the SEO gurus are like high priests claiming to know what God is thinking.

Facebook. What?

2008 will be the year we collectively forget about facebook. And give up on social networking for the sake of social networking. My hope is that Open Social and similar will help make possible really useful applications that are socially enabled.

Web $2

You pronounce that web two dollars. I predict the end of Web 2.0 rounded corner build-it-and-think-of-a-business-model bubble. Why? Because with weakening economies in the US and Europe, VCs belts are going to tighten and there will be less money lying around for the high-risk punt at gathering a few million members to somehow later.

Those that have collected the few million members will start the money making machines. I’d predict some good old-fashioned outrage as fun Web 2 sites start to sell their members data or attention to stay afloat.

I’m hoping the focus goes back on to decent revenue-making businesses and some really good ideas emerge and start and work. And people actually pay for it and are happy doing that. People don’t mind paying for stuff, as long as they can really see the value. You need more than (another plain old) social network to pass that test.

The answer to the question that twitter is

I think this year we’ll see the answer to the question “What is twitter for?” And I’m not sure we are going to like the answer. See Web 2$ above. I’d love twitter to stay its lovely simple self, but I’m just a little worried it can’t be.

A new A-List :-)

The old A-listers will collapse en mass from spending too many long nights mumbling into seesmic and will be replaced with a new widgetized microblogging A-list that say nothing useful but say it all the time all over the place. Oh hang on, has this already happened? :-)

Widgety Goodness Highlights

What a great conference Widgety Goodness was. Congrats to Ivan for pulling it off, from idea to hundreds of people showing up in six weeks or something.

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.

Adding RSS blog posts to a web page

If you have a blog and a regular website, often it is really nice to get headlines or a little bit of blog info into the regular website. You can put a news sidebar on a page, and give people links to go further into the blog.

[Read more]

Hosting changes for barkingowl.com and presencelabs.com clients

Over the next couple of months we are going to be moving our hosting clients over to spanking new scalable virtual servers from slicehost.com.

As we do that, we are also changing the environment a bit to drop some little used services and update lots of things to make it easier for everybody. Here are some of the changes planned:

• We are moving to a single php code install for wordpress blogs, so we can easily track and keep wordpress updated. This means that you’ll always have the updated version of wordpress available to you, making blog spam catching better, security better, and keeping you at the leading edge of

• We’re moving to Ubuntu as operating system from the existing Debian. That’s a little change really, but makes the latest and best packages available.

• We are making web serving changes to enhance performance and security. You won’t notice anything here, except things will be faster.

More on this closer to the time — I’ll be in touch with you all personally to talk through the migration beforehand.

Oh powerbook!

My trusty Powerbook g4 is back in the shop again. Sigh. After a couple of days of fairly weird behaviour, it got to the point of presenting a black screen and running the fan full blast.

Dead logic board suspected.

This is the third major fault since July.

I’ve only had it back for a couple of weeks since the last logic board replacement. We’ll see what happens.

What this practically means is that I move all my non-online files to Lib’s old iMac g4, which works great but is a bit slow these days. Still a pleasure to use. And reinstall the current set of apps i’m using. MySQL, PHP5, gCal.app

Thankfully, a lot of my working tool and files are held online these days:

* email in gmail

* calendar in google calender

* more and more documents and spreadsheets in google docs

* code in subversion archives at online service providers

and so on.

What isn’t online: local app, experiments in code not yet in subversion. Offline writing. *My Todo List* grr.

I’m hoping Apple will come through with something, given how many failures I’ve had lately.

drinks at office Friday 28th 5pm

We’re having our first OpenBeer drinks at the office, 50 Providence Place on this Friday 28th Sept at 5pm.

Come over and share a beer and chat or network or just look out the window.

See the event on upcoming.

A Place Called Providence

We’ve started a group blog for our co-working office space in Providence Place.

It ought to be a laugh and give a bit of a sense of the round-the-table conversation we enjoy. Check out aplacecalledprovidence.com.

EcoTeams

I’m doing some work for [Global Action Plan](http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/) for their [EcoTeams project](http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/index.cfm?TERTIARY_ID=0&PRIMARY_ID=31&SECONDARY_ID=38).

The EcoTeams project is all about helping households reduce their environmental impact from energy, water-use and waste by working together and measuring and reporting on consumption and waste.

I’m so pleased to be associated with such a positive, practical project and working with a great group of people at GAP. I’m working on the EcoTeams website, which includes measurement capture, reporting and management of teams, plus a lot of database work.

Keeping it simple (and not scary)

Bret Treasure [writes about our ajaxy menu planner](http://freebeer.com.au/2007/08/17/finger-food/) over at [Free Beer](http://freebeer.com.au):

>The site is very simple to use and deliberately collects very little information from the window-shopper. The role of the web site is to generate phone inquiries and web forms frighten them off.

Scouta Agents for Mac and Windows released

Over at [Scouta](http://scouta.com) we have just released the [Scouta iTunes Agent for Windows](http://scouta.com/download/win), following on from releasing the [iTunes/Mac](http://scouta.com/download/mac) version about a month ago. If you’d like to get recommended online audio, video and podcasts based on what you watch (no ratings required), the grab and install the Agent, and it will watch what you watch and listen to and recommend more relevant content for you.


Over at dconstuct 2007 last Friday, [Tom Coates](http://2007.dconstruct.org/speakers/#tom) was talking about how your product extends further than your website. Well, adding these agents means that you can get the Scouta recommendation experience without leaving your iPod, Apple TV, or iTunes. It can be a pretty magical thing to get recommended content just showing up on your iPod without having to do anything apart from syncing your iPod now and again.

Busy commuters are going to totally love this.

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