It’s time for our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media.

Looking back at our 2008 Web predictions, we got some of them right! "The big Internet companies will [embrace] open standards" (Google, Yahoo and others did this); "Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008" (check!); "Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground" (Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine were released and AWS grew). We also got some wrong, including most of our acquisition picks! Digg, Twitter, Zoho, Tumblr - all remain independent. Not to be deterred, we’ve made new acquisition predictions for ‘09… although the names will be familiar ;-)

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So check out our predictions for ‘09 and please contribute your own in the comments.

Richard MacManus

1. iTunes adds social networking features; but it’s still a closed development system.
2. Facebook signs up to OpenSocial; whether or not this happens, there’s no doubt that Google will continue to collect big name supporters for the various open standards initiatives which it has started in the last couple of years.
3. Yahoo sells to a big media company, but it won’t be Microsoft; Yahoo getting bought is a big call and I hope I’m wrong about it - but e.g. I could see the likes of Rupert Murdoch swooping in if things get much worse for the former dot com high flyer.
4. Microsoft releases a cool online version of Office, but then Google releases an amazing new version of Google Docs; Microsoft promised the first bit at PDC ‘08, but when that launches I forsee it being trumped soon after by Google releasing a more powerful version of its browser-based Google Docs. One that is comparable in user experience (but not features, because that is unnecessary) to MS Word. This new version of Google Docs may be limited to Chrome at first, but it will get a lot of attention and scare the bejeebers out of Redmond.
5. Health web apps start getting attention from mainstream people and media; big breathless profiles from the likes of CNN, Time magazine, etc. Unfortunately health system red tape remains a tangly mess, for another year.
6. Apps that do filtering, inferring and recommendation have a great year; several will release plug-ins for Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook and other ’sipping from the firehose’ apps.
7. The usual suspects will remain unacquired in ‘09: Digg, Twitter, Technorati. The one that does get bought is FriendFeed - by Google probably, given that it was created by ex-Googlers.
8. Media properties prominently experiment with different and innovative types of online advertising; in other words the move beyond CPM starts to actually happen, due to the down economy, after years of CPA type predictions. Related, a stunning new metric will emerge that accurately determines the success of media properties beyond mere page views (ok that one’s wishful thinking maybe!).

Marshall Kirkpatrick

1. Lifestreams will continue to evolve; From the explosion of the newsfeed-powered Facebook to the
   experimental polling technology of FriendFeed, 2008 was a big year for
   the “lifestream” - the technology of aggregating data from all your
   activities on different social networks around the web. No one summed
   it up better than Mark Krynsky in his Lifestream Blog post The
   Year in Lifestreaming for 2008.

   In 2009, I’ll be watching the parties above, but also MovableType’s
   Motion, social media ping server Gnip, Strands on the iPhone and
   Chris Messina and friends’ new
   working group on Activity Streams.

2. Facebook will continue to surprise;

   I love to hate Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg and company keep bringing
   me back to a state of…impressed. I wish open standards ruled the
   world, but Facebook Connect is so compelling that it can’t be ignored.
   I’d like to see Data Portability prioritized a touch above full-blown
   privacy, but Facebook’s relatively tame version of portability is
   getting real traction while others are stuck in the land of promises
   and proofs of concept.

3. Big companies will have incentive to give OpenID more support
   because of Facebook’s domination;

   Support has been relatively tepid in the past. When you’re winning,
   open standards aren’t in your interest. When you aren’t, they become
   much more appealing. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo - all have made meaningful
   moves to support OpenID before, but now that Facebook is clearly
   dominating them all, I expect to see these companies make bigger moves
   towards OpenID and other standards.

4. Have cake and eat it too solutions will emerge as a strong option;

   Have you seen JanRain’s
   RPX plug-in? It lets users log in to a website using OpenID or
   proprietary methods, like Facebook Connect, through the same
   interface. It’s really pretty, too. There are other examples of this
   kind of paradigm, but I expect to see them proliferate in the coming
   year.

5. One or two interface developments will blow us away;

   The iPhone inspired countless people about user interfaces, unlike
   anything else has in a long time. Somebody’s going to blow our minds
   again. Information overload alone demands radical innovation, and it’s
   in the works all around the world. Maybe
   it will be Mozilla, maybe it will be in gaming, perhaps in Adobe
   AIR, or it could be in Microsoft’s Silverlight. May it not be a
   brain implant.

Sarah Perez

1. Twitter announces they have a plan to make money. They do.
2. New iPhone is released with video recording capabilities.
3. Facebook Connect becomes new de facto way to login to web sites.
4. Google Reader gets themes.
5. Digg still not acquired by anyone.
6. New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more in ways we never could have imagined.
7. Out of work journalists band together and create some killer blogs.
8. Google Chrome adds plugins…one of them is a Google plugin that lets you integrate Google Mail, Reader, & other Google products/services right into the browser.
9. Netbooks stay hot…get lighter, faster, thinner, but thanks to variable pricing from manufacturers, line between notebooks and netbooks blurs.
10. Google backlash begins.
11. Apple backlash does not.
12. New iPods released…now with VOIP app built-in. AT&T concerned.
13. Professional twitterer becomes a real job.

Bernard Lunn

1. VCs jump onto the SAAS bandwagon, but most ventures don’t need the cash.
2. More Indian start-ups go global with price-smashing strategy.
3. 2009 will be like 2002 for raising money or exiting.
4. P2P shows value for reducing cost of server farms.
5. Consumer and regulatory backlash make online privacy into a key differentiator for major players.

Frederic Lardinois

1. Digg still won’t be bought.
2. Twitter will start to embed advertising into its users streams as it slowly becomes mainstream.
3. Google will finally offer a comprehensive online storage solution and some kind of travel product.
4. Lifestreaming apps like FriendFeed will remain niche products that only serve the early adopter market.
5. Streaming web video to the living room will go mainstream.
6. If Apple finally enables its push server, mobile social networks and geolocation enabled apps will become a major topic next year.

Lidija Davis

1. Google loses goodwill, Yahoo gains.
2. Microsoft resurrects WebTV after buying out Netflix.
3. Mixx concentrates on usability and starts gaining ground on Digg.
4. Facebook has one security incident too many, leading to a decline in popularity.
5. The value of having a unified system for data portability and single sign-in services becomes unmistakable after a significant privacy breach.

Sean Ammirati

1. Twitter will be acquired (probably by Facebook–but multiple suitors will compete for the deal).
2. Due to new leadership and a slow economy that has people more focused on their professional network, LinkedIn will grow in the public’s consciousness and more importantly grow their revenue dramatically.
3. Exciting new open source projects will emerge and grow due to a growing number of un/under employed engineers.
4. Unfortunately, Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method for authentication on the web (while this is my prediction, I’m still rooting for a more open solution).
5. Microsoft will launch a competing platform with Apple’s App Store. The reaction from the market will be underwhelming.

Alex Iskold

1. Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is going to see further decline.
2. Amazon will further strengthen its position in the cloud computing market, by launching more of its Web Services and gaining more clients for existing ones.
3. More contextual browsing technologies will hit the market powered by improved top-down semantic recognition engines.
4. The browser wars will further heat up, with Google throwing marketing dollars and distribution deals behind Chrome.

Rick Turoczy

1. With the economy continuing to tank, Microsoft will double-down on its Facebook investment, garnering more control of the company - and more access to the data being gathered through Facebook Connect.
2. Google will finally solve the issues that have prevented its adoption of OpenID logins for all Google services. That, combined with EAUT, will make Gmail accounts the de facto login credential on the Web.
3. One of the major gaming platform companies - Nintendo, Sega, Sony - will begin acquiring small iPhone development shops in an effort to translate titles to the iPhone format and to corner the market on iPhone gaming.
4. Under pressure from iPhone, Android, Symbian, and RIM; Windows Mobile will attempt to reinvent itself. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it will be about as successful as Vista and the Zune.
5. eBay - the Yahoo! of 2009 - oscillates between break-up and acquisition. After a great deal of drama, it will eventually be acquired by Amazon and incorporated into its seller storefront offering.

There you have it, the picks of the ReadWriteWeb team; what about your predictions? Let us know in the comments, so we can check who among us all has gloating rights at the end of 2009.

Discuss

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well - a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

Now we’re going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We’ve reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list - so if we haven’t mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

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BooRah

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year. One of BooRah’s most interesting aspects is that it uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah’s data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

Swotti

Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. We reviewed the product back in March. Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Dapper MashupAds

Earlier this month we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that’s related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

How this works: in the back end, Dapper will be analyzing the fields that publishers identify and will apply a layer of semantic classification on top of them. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. Dapper also has a product called Semantify, for SEO - see our review of that.

For more on Semantic advertising, see our write-up of a panel on this topic from the Web 3.0 Conference.

Inform.com

Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher’s own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published. We reviewed it in January, when at the time the company had more than 100 clients - including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist.

Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher’s content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com.

Siri

We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until October this year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project.

In our October post on Siri, we discovered that Siri is working on a "personalized assistant that learns." We expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas. Based on our discussion with founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer in October, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri plans to launch in the first half of 2009.

Evri

Evri is a Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame) backed semantic search engine that launched into a limited beta in June. Evri is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms. It especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. You can check out a tour of Evri here.

UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

Imindi

Imindi is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine". Imindi was recommended to us in the comments to our previous post by Yihong Ding, who called it "an untraditional Semantic Web service". Yihong said that traditionally Semantic Web services employ machines to understand humans, however Imindi's approach is to encourage humans to better understand each other via machines.

Imindi has met with a fair amount of skepticism so far - and indeed it appears to be reaching big with its AI associations. However we think it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to see if it can live up to the description on its About page: "By capturing the free form associations of user's logic and intuition, IMINDI is building a global mind index which is an entirely new resource for building collective intelligence and leveraging human creativity and subjectivity on the web."

See also: Thinkbase: Mapping the World’s Brain

Juice

We’ve all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you’ve forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag. In our review of Juice, we concluded that it avoids some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set.

Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool which we reviewed back in May. It offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Conclusion

The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round.

Discuss

A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.

Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.

To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone’s guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.

The Results

A reminder that the ‘opinion’ category is what you hope will happen and ‘prediction’ is what you think will happen.

Two points were consistent with our expectations:

• The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won’t.
• The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.

One result that surprised us was that many people didn’t expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.

For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina’s post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure’s response.

What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?

A month ago we wrote about Reuters launching an API called Open Calais, a technology that "does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events." I mentioned Calais in my Media08 presentation last week entitled Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It generated interest in the media-focused audience I presented to, so in this post we follow up with Reuters and ask what progress is being made. Specifically we look at what apps have been built so far on Calais and get feedback from Reuters’ Tom Tague.

Quick Recap of Open Calais

Open Calais is a Semantic Web technology - and in this case the next generation of the Clear Forest product, which Reuters acquired in April ‘07 (see our Dec ‘06 review). Alex Iskold’s post last month is ‘must read’ to understand what Open Calais is and why Reuters bought it. This diagram summarizes:

The API is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and Reuters told us last month that it is prepared to scale for a massive concurrent demand. The API is great for third party developers, because it gives them access to Reuters data. And it benefits Reuters, because it enables Reuters to aggregate metadata for its own uses.

Alex listed some possible uses: intelligent search engines that look for related content, automatically inserting links into raw text, structured alerts, on-the-fly text analysis within your browser.

Example Apps?

So it sounds great in theory, but are there any examples of Open Calais apps so far? Reuters has a “bounty” program set up, whereby developers are invited to create Open Calais applications and Reuters will pay for that. However, it seems there has been little - if any - takeup of the bounties.

Top of the list of wanted apps was a Wordpress plugin. Tom Tague, who is leading the Calais initiative at Reuters, noted in the forum that "unfortunately - and unexpectedly - we haven't seen any reasonable applications for the bounty process so we'll most likely be contracting for the development of the WordPress plugin." Perhaps the amount of the bounty in this case was an issue - Reuters only offered $5000 for the Wordpress plugin, which doesn't seem like much of an incentive.

So Reuters has been forced to take the initiative and release some apps of their own. One is a new web based document submission tool and viewer. There is some sign of action in the Open Calais forum, on a page where developers can list what they’re working on. A developer named Craig has built an example of Calais semantics using pure PHP and Abhay Kumar has a similar service. These are all ‘data input’ tools. For an ‘output’ example, check out Mark Choate’s RSS implementation of Calais data (example below).

Interview with Reuters’ Tom Tague

Clearly, it's early days. I asked Open Calais lead Tom Tague how the initiative is progressing? Tom replied that "we’re about where we expected to be in terms of applications for Calais." He told us that the service is "just a little over 45 days old and much of the effort we’re seeing is in building tools to explore the capabilities themselves."

At this time Open Calais has just over 1,500 developers signed up; with about 30% of those developers actually making calls to and experimenting with the service. "One of the more exciting things that’s going on," Tom Tague told us, "are several community-led efforts to build Calais libraries for Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET and others. These will provide a great accelerant for developers to gain access to the service."

How is Reuters using Calais In-house?

So, at this point there is nothing to see for non-developers - the apps that have come out so far are developer-focused and not something the rest of us can use. So my next question to Tom was: how is Reuters itself using the Calais technology?

Tom replied that Reuters has several things underway:

"We're in the process of adding rich metadata to over 20 years of historical news archives (many millions of articles) to improve searchability and organization. We’re doing a lot of work in automating and generally improving the efficiency of a massive real time content ingestion process. We’re working with one of the community platforms deployed for Reuters customers to improve the tagging and classification of user generated content. And, of course, we have significant efforts under way to generate “machine readable news” to drive low-latency algorithmic trading. All of these efforts are based on the same technology platform driving the Calais initiative."

Conclusion: Show Us The Apps!

I must admit that I was expecting to see some working apps by now. Perhaps it is a similar case to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s experience of Twine (published earlier today), the Semantic knowledge management service that received much early hype. Marshall thinks that Twine is underdone at this time and that the ‘consumer’ experience is lacking. Calais is much newer of course and, as Tom Tague said, it has only been out in the open for 45 days. So it would be unfair to compare the two efforts. Nevertheless, it would be great to see some compelling consumer-facing apps for Open Calais; even better would be to see something from Reuters that shows the public the benefits of semantic technologies.

Alex Iskold listed a number of consumer apps that could be built using Calais, by Reuters or external parties. I think people need to see at least one of those pretty soon - in order to translate the interest that Open Calais is generating from media and other people, into something non-geeks can see working on the Web and producing noticeably better information results. To paraphrase the famous Jerry Maguire quote, ‘Show me the apps!’.

Today I gave a presentation at the Media08 event in Sydney, entitled: What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It’s an overview of some of the top trends we cover on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. The presentation is available as a slideshow (embedded below). Each slide has links to ReadWriteWeb content, should you wish to drill down on a topic more.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. The Media08 event was run by X|Media|Lab.

Note: click here and then click ‘full’ (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

The excellent Trendsspotting blog has compiled a meta list of 2008 Web trends, by selecting “a group of 10 web/tech influencers suggesting their trends forecast for 2008.” ReadWriteWeb is one of the 10 influencers selected - using our 10 Future Web Trends post as our contribution. But see also 10 More Future Web Trends and our 2008 Web Predictions post for more RWW trends.

Below is Trendsspotting’s image from our post, which neatly displays our picks:

Note that all the RWW authors contributed to the 10 Future Web Trends post, so they weren’t just my ideas.

Trendsspotting came up with a tag cloud that combines the keywords from all of the 10 influencers:

It’s very high level, but you can see that mobile, open, video, green, social, and networks are among the most popular tags.

Here is the full report, well worth a browse:

What Web applications and trends will make it big in 2008? In this post the RWW authors ruminate on the current trends in Web technology and look forward to what 2008 might bring us. Topics include Google, semantic web, online advertising, recommendation systems, Facebook, digg, open standards, Mobile Web, search engines, and much more!

So check out our predictions for ‘08 and please contribute your own in the comments. Also you may want to review our track record for 2007 Web predictions.

Richard MacManus, Editor, ReadWriteWeb:

1. Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like Twine and Freebase, and apps that use semantic technologies under the hood (such as AdaptiveBlue and Snap).

2. In tandem with #1, Google will experiment more with Semantic Apps in ‘08. The Knols project, although not overly semantic, is a hint of this direction.

3. Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground in ‘08, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and others competing to provide ‘Web OS’ and online storage to consumers. Unfortunately this may spell the end of a number of startups in this space.

4. Zoho and/or ThinkFree will be acquired by big companies wanting to leapfrog into the Web Office space.

5. The online advertising market will consolidate, after the spate of acquisitions in 2007. CPM will continue to dominate for media brands and CPC for niche sites, although there will be experimentation in VRM and other forms of highly specific targeting of ads. Privacy issues will prevent the latter from becoming mainstream though. The much-hyped CPA (Cost per Action) will continue to be a pipe dream, because publishers simply don’t want it.

6. The big Internet companies will surprise us all by embracing open standards, and attempting to compete with each other with features instead of data lock-in (OK, this could just be wishful thinking!).

7. The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won’t happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea). At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. Twitter will be acquired.

2. Most ad networks will start producing their own content to advertise
against; and some content companies today will get acquired by ad
networks.

3. Online video will become so ubiquitous, including live and mobile,
that everyone will wonder how the internet existed without it. It
won’t feel like a big deal, though.

4. A handful of big companies will let you start logging in with an
OpenID associated with your account.

5. The value of recommendation engines will become all the more clear;
the era of data will be celebrated.

6. People will rebel against Google, at least a little bit. Maybe.

7. People engaged in the new web will do some really awesome stuff that
we’ll all be in awe of.

Josh Catone, Lead Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. Tumblr will be acquired.

2. Privacy will be a growing concern in the mainstream, but ultimately
people won't really take any action and for the most part, things won't
change. Some companies and groups (think Mozilla) will push for better
privacy controls for users, while others (think Facebook) will continue
to push the envelope and continue down a slippery slope. Users will
eventually push back, but I am hesitant to say that proverbial "straw
that breaks the camel's back" will come in 2008.

3. OpenID will be adopted by more startups and larger web companies, but
most people (mainstream users) still won’t use it - that’s a couple of
years off.

4. Facebook will continue to grow and their platform will be adopted by
other large social networks. Google will sweat.

5. Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008. It’s already big in
many parts of the world; and Westerners are about to get hooked. With
new mobile devices that makes web surfing less painful, people will be
more and more connected away from their computers.

6. Mainstream media coverage will be a catalyst for the adoption of Web
Office apps by consumers; and Microsoft will eventually be forced to
change their Web Office strategy and offer a fully online office suite
(but that latter won’t happen in 2008). Offline mode (Gears, AIR, Silverlight,
etc.) will be what really tips the scales and causes mainstream users to
to embrace the as-of-yet unfamiliar world of Web Office applications.

Alex Iskold, Feature Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. 2008 will be slow and cautious, with the first half dominated by recession or fear of recession.

2. Facebook is going to see the same kind of decline in popularity in 2008 that MySpace saw in 2007.

3. Digg is going to be acquired by one of the mainstream media conglomerates.

4. Implicit applications, which monitor our habits and automatically infer our likes, will rise.

Emre Sokullu, Feature Writer, ReadWriteWeb

1. Facebook will acquire companies that do the following, in order to strengthen their advertising unit: personalization, behavior tracking, image recognition (Riya?)

2. Facebook will release a browser.

3. However, despite all that… Facebook will decline.

4. Google OpenSocial will be a failure; Google will try to create its own social networking empire by making acquisitions in this space.

5. Microsoft will become more aggresive and buy many popular companies at once (remember Ballmer’s quote). Candidates include SixApart, Technorati.

Sean Ammirati, Editor, ReadWriteTalk (our podcast show):

1. Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the ‘one trick pony’ comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they’ll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cause frustration. Plus, they will increasingly be perceived as the ‘evil’ company in many of these new initiatives.

2. Closely related, Yahoo’s Hack strategy (see ReadWriteTalk’s podcast with Bradley Horowitz) will start to bear fruit and things will look much more optimistic in Sunnyvale this year.

3. Facebook will start to feel pressure from two trends that will emerge on the web: distributed social networks and distributed commerce systems. For distributed commerce systems, look to see a first proof of concept from the VRM project. Chris Messina’s diso project with Wordpress will be a great proof of concept for distributed social neworks.

4. Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

5. There will be a lot of innovation in the hyper-local space, putting the final nail in the newspaper industry’s coffin. This will include companies like Outside.in and Yelp moving toward widespread use and new web properties (from both startups and big Internet Cos) emerging.

6. Finally, a 3G iPhone! OK, I don’t know if this is a prediction, but I really really want it to be true :)

Charles Knight, Editor, AltSearchEngines (RWW network blog)

1. In the 1st Q 2008, the true "Google Killer" in search will be in Stealth Mode.
In 2nd Q 2008 the first prototype will begin in closed Alpha mode.
In 3rd Q 2008 it will be ready for the final closed Beta testing.
In 4th Q 2008 it will launch and "Rock and Shock" the world!

2. The classic Vertical Search Engines (Job Search, Health,
Consumer Electronics, Shopping, Video, People, more…)
will continue their dominance over all other Search Engines in their various niches.

3. The Alternative Search Engines will pick up the pace of
partnerships and cooperation, for their solid mutual benefit.

4. Mainstream Media interest in the Alts will increase until
it begins to rival coverage of the five major search engines.

5. The trend towards ‘widgetization’ of the Alts will continue.
Approximately 2 in 10 Alternative
Search Engines (20%) have widgets now, and that number will double in
2008 to 4 in 10 or 40%.

Conclusion

Now it’s time for you to tell us your Web predictions for 2008. Please leave a comment or trackback below!

Crystal Ball image by Blue Cubic Electron Syncrony, via Flickr

I’m very pleased to announce a brand new design for ReadWriteWeb, including a new look n’ feel and new logo. The design was created and implemented by San Francisco design firm Ideacodes - specifically Emily Chang, Max Kiesler and Bryan Collick. Personally I’ve been a big fan of Ideacodes for a long time, so I was thrilled to work with them on this new design.

It’s been a year or so since our last major re-design. And this is the first RWW design where I haven’t been involved in the coding myself.

The goal of the re-design was to achieve a fresh and bold new look, with cleaner layout and CSS. We also hope the new design will encourage more community on RWW, enhance the way our content is presented, and overall give the brand some oomph.

First up, you will notice that we have a new logo. We’ve kept the yin-yang symbol, as that to me has always represented ‘read/write’ and the harmony of that concept - but the symbol has been modernized. The logo type is bolder and emphasizes the letters RWW. And can you spot the subtle thing that’s been removed from the logo? The ‘/’ between Read and Write is now gone. Although I have always thought that the slash was meaningful (or maybe I just thought it was cool!), in practical terms it was a slight hindrance - in terms of spelling our name and perhaps even making it difficult to type the URL. So from now on we’ll be calling ourselves ReadWriteWeb, or RWW for short.

Finally on the logo, the design buffs among you will appreciate me telling you that the font is now Arial - a cleaner, more modern and readable font than the Lucinda Grande/Verdana we previously used.

The other major change is that the site now has a white background, with a distinctive red header. Over the past year I had felt the red background of our old design was overwhelming for some readers. On the other hand the red is closely associated with ReadWriteWeb and lots of people like it, so I was keen to keep it in some form. The new header, I hope you’ll agree, is distinctive and the bold splash of red makes our brand stand out.

Personally I love the new logo and header, but I am certain they will provoke different opinions. Why? Because that was the case with the ReadWriteWeb authors during the design process! That’s good though - I’d much rather have a bold design that gets different reactions, than a bland one that gets no reaction ;-)

Other new features you will see on the new ReadWriteWeb:

• Popular Posts; this list at the top of the page is automatic and right now is based on the most commented posts.
• Popular Tags; a list of the tags we’re using in Movable Type.
• More prominent and bigger RWW Readers section, via MyBlogLog.
• Search in the header (a much requested feature!)
• New main categories, which we think better describe what RWW is about content-wise.
• Shorter post extracts on the homepage, for better scannability.

Plus of course we’ve kept and enhanced features such as ‘Featured Posts’, ‘Recent Jobs’, the swicki search and more.

We have more new features in the works, so keep an eye out for those over the next month or so.

A huge thanks to Ideacodes for their inspiring vision and hard work. I want to also thank our web hosts Media Temple, who worked beyond the call of duty to help us get the new site up and running. Also thank you to Six Apart for their help and advice regarding Movable Type 4.

Let us know what you think of the new design in the comments. As with any new design rollout, there may be a few little bugs to be cleaned up, bits to tweak, things to align, etc. The OpenID login for example isn’t quite ready. So the new design is still a bit of a ‘Work in Progress’.

We’re keen to hear your feedback and any suggestions! And shout out if you come across things that need fixing.

Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007 as Facebook and our Best LittleCo of 2007 as Twitter. In this post we’ll give you our pick for Most Promising for Web in 2008.

Originally we planned to pick the most promising Web company for 2008. But in the end the ReadWriteWeb team decided to follow the example set by Time magazine last year, when it named "You" as its 'Person of the Year'.

Likewise we think there is no single Web company that is more promising than… the open source movement, a loose-knit group that aims to make a huge impact by tying all Web companies together.

We’ve seen many examples of the open source movement ramping up on the Web this year:

- Web browsers; Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is perhaps the best example, having made significant ground on Microsoft’s proprietary browser in ‘07. And just this week Opera picked a legal fight with Microsoft in Europe, citing lack of open source standards as one of its complaints.

- Social networks have begun to open up; Facebook’s platform, followed by Google’s OpenSocial (a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web) and now seemingly every social network is opening their platform. None of these are completely open, but the trend is for that to eventually happen.

- The drive towards open standards on the Mobile Web; Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C continue to push for this. And as Rudy De Waele wrote on this blog, mobile 2.0 is about "open standards, open-source development and open access - creating more options for the user, not enclosing them in the walled gardens currently (still) used by operators."

It’s worth mentioning Android Mobile OS here, the open-source mobile operating system that Google announced in November this year. Android will be available for any phone manufacturer to install and build on top of. It will allow for extensive use of Google applications, mashups based on those applications combined with third party apps and will in time live on portable devices other than phones, like car navigation systems.

- Microformats, the Web community’s open standards for structured data, has a lot of promise - expect to see them implemented in not only Firefox but IE and the other browsers next year.

- The distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec OAuth recently released what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The OAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.

- The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched in December (see Marshall Kirkpatrick’s review) - this will hopefully be the catalyst for more Internet companies to adopt it in 2008.

- An open ad network is a viable alternative to Google Adsense. We reviewed a new initiative called OpenAds in June, so this will be interesting to watch in 2008.

Conclusion

We could name more open source opportunities for the Web in 2008 (and please add them in the comments), but Alex Iskold summed up the potential for ‘open data’ with this diagram:

As Alex wrote here: "The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is
that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop
worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an
API."

So overall, we think 2008 will be a bumper year for the Open Source movement on the Web. What do you think? What other parts of the Web are ripe for open source initiatives next year?

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick’s influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold’s analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!

Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents — "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "…at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.

What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:

"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Conclusion

I’m very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I’m not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term ‘Graph’ or ‘Social Graph’. It really doesn’t matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this ‘next level’ of the Web. That’s what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it’s great to see Tim Berners-Lee ‘re-using’ concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it’s fantastic he is reaching out to the ‘web 2.0′ community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold’s Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex’s latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).