Google vs. Twitter

With 750 million users, most of Facebook’s time is supposedly spent on pictures and games. In its initial iteration, Google+ does not seem to support those core components of the platform, which may make one wonder if Facebook really is the target. What it does support today, however, is a better version of Twitter, complete with specific status updates. So, in its current iteration, I would venture that the target for Google+ is Twitter.

Which may lead one to wonder why Google is so aggressively going after Twitter. I believe it is doing so because Twitter search may be starting to steal traffic, and potentially revenue from Google search. In a somewhat unsurprising move, Google decided to not renew its revenue agreement to get access to the Twitter stream. I would venture that this is an attempt to kneecap Twitter and ensure it doesn’t become a serious threat when it comes to advertising revenue.

While the company is generally considered as one that tries to do no evil, Google is also keenly aware that its success relies largely on two near monopolies: search and online advertising. With Twitter emerging as the first serious competitor in the space in a long time, rumored to be racking in $60–70 million a year in advertising revenue that could easily be targeted based on tweets, Google is seeing red and acting accordingly against the threat.

Google vs. Facebook

Meanwhile, there is the fight against Facebook. Facebook presents a different problem for Google in that it has taken an increasing share of online users time and put it in their walled garden, away from the web that Google mines for revenue. This trend is largely built on the back of games and photos so Google+ will try to tackle those things next.

While it is clear that, within the code, are hooks that will allow for games to be hosted on the platform, it is unclear whether that strategy can succeed. The main challenge they will encounter is that, as the owners of slide, Google is not just a provider of platform for online gaming but also a major player in the space. As such, some of the smaller players may be worried that the platform could sway in ways that me be less than beneficial to them. Zynga, because it needs to get rid of its current dependency on Facebook will probably hedge by putting some of their games on the platform but it is unclear as to whether other companies might join in.

On the picture end of things, Google is leveraging its Picasa offering, however, it is clear that it could do more by integrating it better in the + platform.  The mobile integration is a nice piece and may actually do collateral damage to a number of mobile photo hosting applications link instagram, for example.

But the picture offering is not enough. A proper merging of YouTube in the offering might give it some extra power by leveraging their strong presence in the video space to offer something that doesn’t yet seem to exist on Facebook.

Google vs. Apple

Apple integrated the new version of iOS with Twitter, basically matching one feature that has existed on many Android phone for a few years. They have yet to integrate with Facebook but I would not be totally surprised if they were to do so in future versions of their device. Android already supports both Facebook and Twitter integration and is supporting Google+ through an added application.

In order for this integration to work, Google will have to integrate Google+ at a much deeper level than it does today. However, with a social network and a mobile offering, Google is in the interesting position of being able to become the social network for mobile devices. On the other hand, the approach they have taken to date leaves much to be desired. By installing two different apps on the device, the experience feels tacked on rather than integrated. The Android team has to do some serious work to really rethink things over and tightly integrate Google+ into the OS, making the experience seamless.

The acquisition game

With a rumored 4–5 million new users in the past couple of weeks, Google is off to a good start with Google+ but still only reaching one percent of the Facebook world. Building on the back of Gmail may be a solid strategic move at this time, as Gmail can get Google to roughly 200 million users. What what about the more than tripling of that number required to get to parity with Facebook? For that, Google is going to have to do a lot of hard work and it’s unclear how they will go about acquiring more accounts going forward.

It may just be that Google will try to require every user of every service they provide to create a Google profile account moving forward. Today, Android users are required to create a gmail (or google apps) account to sync up their device. This represents one acquisition channel that none of the other players in the social media space have and could be one big area for growth.

Another area for potential growth is in the enterprise space: looking at the Google hangout feature, it seems to me that circles could become a useful way to organize a company and get quick online meetings. In fact, it may be more useful as a working tool than as a merely social one.

Still, at this time, it is hard to see a case where Google could topple Facebook. But the history of social networks is riddled with the bodies of players that were once at the top and eventually superseded by new entrants (think Friendster and MySpace) so it is not totally impossible that Facebook could find itself in hot competitive waters.

What about reputation rating systems?

Last but not least is the question around reputation rating systems like Klout or Peerindex. Those companies have built their model on the back of Twitter and Facebook and must urgently adapt to include Google+. With many early adopters spending more time on Gooogle’s property, the reputation rating game has a new entry point that will need to be urgently included in their calculations if they want to continue being relevant. When I first mentioned this, many people replied that those services are just not good enough as is and it seems that they have yet another challenge to deal with if they want to establish themselves as relevant in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Some thoughts on Google+. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The following are based on observations of how people I know have handled the issues around content ownership and online presence. I’m not going to endorse any of them in particular as I think that those type of things differ based on many social factors, including but not limited to your work situation (some people may, by law, not have a choice), your age (it appears to me that, the younger you are, the more comfortable you are with disclosing more), the country you live in (my European and Asian friends tend to be more reserved).

So, without further ado, here are five ways I’ve witnessed people and companies using to manage their online presence:

1. Obscurity: No participation is a form of management
2. Controlled: Heavy use of controlling mechanism to parse communication.
3. Broadcasting: Mainly using the services as tools to market one’s content in other areas.
4. Additive: Sharing content on social networks that is not shared in other realms.
5. All-in: Abandoning other forms of media distribution and exclusively leveraging social networks

Obscurity

We are now roughly half a decade to a decade into the social web phenomenon so few people or companies can claim to not have heard of the phenomenon. And yet, some do not appear on social networks. In my discussion with people or companies that do not participate, it seems that many people are simply choosing to not participate. In some cases, it is because they do not see the value: for example, Tina Fey recently explained that she’s not using Twitter by saying “I guess I feel if I had any jokes, I would just hold them”.

So the people who are not present on social network by choice often decide on that lack of presence for economic reason (figuring they may not want to share their content with the services’ owners).

Others have decided on obscurity as a way to avoid dealing with any issue that could arise out of conflicts due to their social media presence. This category of people may actually create more problems for themselves as they let others define them in the online social realm.

Last but not least is the pseudo-obscurity used by some, for example hiding their identity behind a pseudonym or something that does not link them to the non-online world. Many teens, for example, no longer use their real names on the likes of Facebook, for fear that college admission bureaus or potential employers could find them. This group is acutely aware of the fact that online records tend to be pretty permanents and that whatever is posted online by or about them can have a long term impact. This sub-group is an interesting one to observe because it shows a high level of engagement with social media while maintaining a similarly high level of anonymity.

Controlled

This category of users tend to be more sophisticated when it comes to articulating arguments about their handling of social media. Some define broad categories and associated rules based on the services they use (for example, one may consider that LinkedIn is for work only but refuse to “friend” co-workers on Facebook or follow them on Twitter). A lot of teenagers also fall in that category, using finely tuned privacy controls on facebook, for example, to decide on who does and doesn’t see what they are up to.

This group of people is acutely aware of the image they want to project in the online world and works hard on sculpting a presence that is finely tuned to each of the micro-audiences they are trying to reach, whether they are friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or other communities of interest.

The level to which one does or does not exert that level of control over their online persona is often hard to discern as people who claim to belong to one of the other categories may actually be sculpting an image of themselves that mirrors the attributes of that category.

Broadcasting

In the real world, one might called this persona a self-promoter. Any information they publish is related to themselves or their own product: come see my presentation, test out my product, buy my book, read my blog entry, vote for me in such and such poll, etc…

This also appears to be the model generally taken on by a lot of established corporation. The engagement here is not engagement but marketing, spewing out messages that barely differ from the type of marketing one might do with a billboard or a TV commercial (but, as some of the proponents of this approach would say, social media is cheaper than those other forms).

Sometimes, this behavior is merely the first sign of a beginner, trying to figure out the new medium but clinging to old models. Over time, one hopes, this persona can abandon the relentless me-me-me focus of their offerings and start participating in conversations with other actors in the space, while at the same time providing information from other sources in the community.

Additive

This persona tries to extend their offering by leveraging social media in a brand new way. For example, Andy Carvin appears to be pioneering a new form of journalism through Twitter, less based on his own reporting and more focused on curating and aggregating topic-specific content (in his case, the current uprisings in the middle east).

In the past, such a persona may have written pieces on blogs that would present a rounded view of a day’s event but now, thanks to services like Twitter or the Facebook status stream, providing pointers to content has become easier than ever.

In other cases, the social media services become a way to share things that may not fit anywhere else, maybe because they are not organized in a particular way or they are too small to share in a different forum.

For example, in my own use, a lot of what I initially posted on Twitter was links to stories or blog posts I had found interesting. Because I have a wide number of things I’m interested in, there is no overriding organizing principles to those links beyond the fact that I found them interesting. This can be frustrating to some of the people who try to follow as the lack of correlation may make the content unclear.

All-in

Think of this persona as the social media equivalent of Tourette syndrome. The idea here is that this persona engages in radical transparency by sharing everything, from where they are at any given time (using Foursquare and the likes), to what they’re eating, to how their bodily functions are doing. People in this category are often seen as oversharing by some of their readers.

One question that I have is whether this category truly exist or whether it is not more of a subset of a controlled experience. For example, it is fascinating to see how people who claim to be part of that category bristle at the idea of sharing some particular details of their lives: everyone has a line they will not cross when it comes to transparency. For some, it is about money; for others, it is about sex; for yet another group, it is about certain friends.

I’d venture that the all-in persona is mostly an invented one, pretending to create a high level of intimacy with followers/friends (fofriends?) in order to extract financial value out of that pseudo-intimacy. It is the kind of things that allows media stars to entertain their fans and retain them in the period between two revenue generating events, whether they are talks, conferences, concerts, books, movies, or other. It gives the fans a sense of closeness to the stars, while keeping them well at a distance.

Bonus category: Mixed

Ultimately, I suspect that a lot of people end up in a space that is actually a mix of the different personas I’ve highlighted above. For example, I’ve seen some people who are opting for obscurity in certain realms become broadcasters in others. And I’ve seen people pretending to be all-in pull back when it comes to certain subjects.

I suspect that there will be a continued discussion in the online space for the next decade at least as more people trying to define and understand what online personas are and where they would like to stand when it comes to their own persona in the online realm.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Five social media presence strategies. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At the time, however, I did not expect things to turn as they just did: I’ve been laid off as I was told that a strategic decision was made by GroupM to get rid of its project management office. With no project management office, there is no need for a project management office director and so, I’m back on the job market.

The shock is still very fresh and I have to admit that I haven’t fully absorbed the blow. My boss was telling me that he was happy with the progress I was making. I was told my work was excellent; and then this.

It’s a sad fact that large corporations do not look at the impact of their decisions on people and so I’m now faced with something I’m not used to: an uncertain future, with unknown prospects.

So I’ve dusted up my resume and I’m starting to pass it around.I’ve also updated my Linkedin profile and sent a twitter message out to my “followers”. I’m wondering if there’s any other “social network” related things I ought to do.

I will entertain any opportunity in the New York area (I do not plan to relocate) and, to sum them up, my skills encompass a wide variety of areas from project management (following some of the models established by PMI and applying them with a practitioner’s eye to what works and doesn’t, both on a local implementation or on a global one), technology (it appears, based on recent experience, that I have a deeper understanding of technologies relating to the internet than a lot of my peers), and strategy (readers of my blog are familiar with some of my strategic positioning)

Based on this, I think that I could easily fit into executive roles in software development, program (or portfolio) management, and product management.

I hope you will all be able to help me in my search for a new position. If you hear anything, drop me a note and thanks in advance for your help.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title On the road again. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I was recently describing my update process to David Strom, after he had posted an entry on his blog about how poor the contact management system in Gmail was, and I hit upon a realization: A lot of the work that goes into keeping all that information up to date seems to be something that ought to be more suited to some level of automation. Why is it that there is no real linkage between my address book, different email systems, social networks, IM systems, Skype (and other voice over IP solutions) and my mobile phone? Each of those appears to live in a silo, unable to offer me a full view of the people I know.

While Plaxo does a good job of synchronizing metadata about people (What I would consider as rank, name, and serial number ie. the basics like physical address, IM address, phone, and email), it has yet to evolve into a solution that would give me a full view of the relationships I have.

I also played with a number of CRM packages like SugarCRM but ultimately, they fail because their view is completely sales-centric, with the idea of people being largely seen as members of a company and sales prospects to be closed. I am not much of a salesperson (unless you consider pushing new ideas on people a type of sale, which arguably it is) but my view of the world is much richer than that. I don’t want to think of people as buyers.

However, the concepts of grouping information in CRMs is somewhat attractive. What I want is a view of my relationship with people that would group:

• The basic type of address book information available in my address book and/or on my PDA and/or phone.
• The rich email discussions I have had with said people
• The similarly rich IM discussions I have had.
• SMS or MMS discussions synched from my phone.
• Social Networks interactions
• Feeds for the person (to things like their blog, their last.fm account, etc…)
• Trackbacks and other blog related discussions.

The interesting thing is that each of this information is available in a digitized fashion but there is no centralized point that allows me to see said information about Joe Smith.

Why is that?

So I’d like to suggest the creation of a new class of software called the “Personal Relationship Manager” or PRM. The purpose of a PRM would be to help you manage your life instead of trying to manage sales.

Basic Personal Relationship Manager

Of course, people are going to say that this product or that product solves my existing problem. In order to get those people to think before they push their solution, let me describe in details what I want:

Contact Information

• Integration of my address book across different email services: the contact part of this is largely completed by Plaxo as they have managed to integrate and aggregate the address book from a number of services. They need to provide an interface to integrate others but they seem closer than anyone else on this.
• Integration of my address book across different IM services: top line, the following would be needed from day one: AIM, MSN IM, Yahoo IM, Google IM, ICQ, and Jabber. I should not have to reenter information for each.
• Integration of my address book across different social networks: this is getting trickier as most of the popular social networks look to that type of data as owned by them. However, an ideal PRM would integrate and aggregate the information my friends give on a social network into a single view.
• Integration of my address book and mobile and VOIP solutions: Caller ID on my VoIP solutions like Skype, Vonage, etc… and on my mobile phone should be integrated into a contact view. Today, my Treo asks me if I want to create a new contact or add a number to a contact if it’s not in my address book already. I want that type of feature across all voice communication solution.

Conversations and Status

• Integration of Email conversations across all email services I use: At minimum, this should allow to bring IMAP and POP into my PRM.
• Integration of IM conversations across all IM services I use: Most IM services now have an archival feature. That should be presented as part of a user view.
• Integration of Social Network Status and related messages across all socially-aware applications: From social network status to Last.FM music, from WeSabe to Twitter, my friends are updating information in a variety of services. I should have a dedicated news feed for each individual view.
• Integration of SMS/MMS history: SMS and MMS sent to my mobile phone should be integrated into the overview of people.
• Possible Integration of Voicemail and audio messages: At a later time, integrating those into the package would be a nice to have.

Input

• The PRM should manage relationships across social network: This ought not be aggressive but the system should check when people I know join a particular network I’m on. If it finds a match, it ought to tell me that it did and, based on my settings, either ask for a linkage automatically, or ask me to approve/deny asking for such linkage.
• The PRM could (not should) become a single point of entry for broadcast messages. For example, if I change jobs (as I did recently), I would update that system with the job change status in a single location and it would update that information across all the touch points where I have entered that information.
• The PRM could (not should) be a single entry point for status broadcast. At the very least, it should allow me to set which system ought to be integrated via simple rules similar to filtering (for example, I could say “If I update Service X, also update Service Y and Service Z.”

Programming Bits

• Low change footprint: A new application should not force me to change everything I already use. Instead, it should work with the applications I already use. This is probably the hardest thing in developing the application I’m highlighting as it will have to integrate with other services/software via some kind of service oriented architecture but not take over their basic features.
• Fully addressable via API: The PRM, if built successfully, would become central to managing relationships. As a result, it could become the source of data that applications could be built on. Because much of the data is personal, a strong set of security and access controls would need to be in place in order to ensure that only the data people in my PRM want to distribute is distributable. On the other hand, the data should be formatted in such a consistent way that developers could build applications that integrate with the PRM.
• Online/Offline addressable: Knock me off the network and I should still be able to have access to some of the data. Put me back on the network and I should be able to resync it all with the most up to date information.
• Decentralized: People tend to prefer having their contact info in the hands of more than one providers as they feel that type of information is largely personal. A PRM solution would thus have to be in a mode that can be federated so no single entity is in full control of the data.

So the purpose of the system, once built, would be to give me a view of my friends/contacts/etc… that is consolidated. It would probably provide me with a high level contact overview (listing all the ways to get in touch with someone), and then allow me to drill on the different conversations I’ve had with the person across a variety of systems (Email, IM, phone, social nets) as well as give me an overview of what they’ve been up to thanks to a status message and socially aware apps screen. And it would have to do all that without me changing any of the systems I’m currently using. It’s a tall order but it’s one that, if satisfied, could easily become the central way for people to manage their relationship.

If your product does indeed satisfy all those requirements, you may have made a sale. And if you have an interest in developing a PRM, I’ll be happy to be an alpha tester.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Personal Relationship Manager. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The funny thing is that this was coinciding with some research I’ve been doing to better understand whether SecondLife is a flash in the pan of whether it holds real meat. Since October, I’ve been tabulating the numbers listed on their front page, once a week, on Mondays. From there, I ended up with the following spreadsheet:

But the data itself wasn’t that interesting when it came to raw form. So I started thinking about some of the things I could do with it. Calculating weekly growth rates was the first thing I looked into but, as more financial data became available, I also started looking at how US dollars to Linden dollars moved along. From there, I ended up with the following spreadsheet:

Some data became clearer as a result of this. Here are a few key findings:

• On average, the number of logins over a 60 day period seems to be about 35 to 40 percent of the total population reported
• The people who log in, however, seem to spend a fair amount of money ($50–60 a week) within the Second Life economy. This seems pretty impressive to me. Now, I’m now accounting for the fact that this is not a standard distribution (meaning that some people may not be spending a single dollar in the world) but it seems to point to large amounts of US dollars coming into the Linden economy.
• The amount of dollars spent seems to vary greatly from week to week with some week seeing a drop compared to the previous week but the averages seem to be going up.
• Except for a drop around the christmas season (I’m assuming because people had better things to do), it seems the average number of logins no a week by week basis is increasing (based on the 60 day average)

The data seems to support claims of growth relating to Second Life. But how far can it grow? To do that assessment, I decided to make a few assumptions

For this data, I decided to take an approach where I would have a conservative projection (based on the lowest week on week growth number), a liberal one (based on the highest week on week growth number), and a most like estimate (based on an average of all the numbers I had). I then baselined against the most recent reporting period. From there, I now had three scenarios for population growth and 60 day logins. I started estimating it out over the next few months:

So, it looks that, under the most conservative growth rate, we will see 3.5 million users registered and over 600,000 using the service by the end of April 2007. Under a liberal interpretation of the data, those numbers would shift to 9.6 million and just under 7 million. However, in the most likely case, it is probable that there will be 7.2 million users registered with 1.6 million logging in over the previous sixty days. Not too shabby. For the sake of planning, I would advise my readers to go with the most conservative estimate because my data set is still relatively small. Even then, this type of growth mirrors some of the growth patterns we’ve seen in the early days of the commercial web and seem to support the contention that LindenLab is going to be a very strong player in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Running the Numbers on Second Life. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Mobile

Last year, I declared that video would be big in the Internet space and this year, I believe that mobile will be a major focus.

The devices

While mobile devices will continue to grow on the existing curve, adding more processing power and more memory, they will also add a number of features with are significantly different from the ones we’ve been accustomed to see on a mobile phone. Cameras will increasingly become just a tick on the feature list and location-aware devices will become more prevalent (they will sport a GPS chip).

The new features will come in 3 key areas: first, more mobile devices will be able to multi-task, allowing users to use functions on their phone while making a call at the same time. The multi-tasking will extend to wireless services too and people will be able to surf the web or use internet-based application at the same time as they are making a phone call. A key hardware change in those mobile devices will be an increase in the number of phones (and other mobile device) that not only have a GSM or CDMA chip but also sport a WiFi receiver. This will allow the devices to run across a variety of networks. I suspect (and am probably going out on a limb here as my guess is that this would be early) that some of the devices will conform to the 802.11n WiFi standard, and will use that technology as a bridge to 3G because 3G deployment in the United States will be slow.

The second big hardware innovation in mobile devices will be the presence of RFID readers and chips that will allow users to use them for person-to-person or person-to-business commerce, turning mobile devices into electronic wallets. Deployments in Near Field Communications for credit cards have already started to happen on a trial basis in cities like New York.

The third big hardware innovation in mobile devices, in my mind, will come from the fact that some devices will be DNLA certified, allowing them to exchange, photos, music and videos with other devices in your house.

The services

This year, the rise of mobile services will be powered by a sharp drop in the price of data service offerings from mobile operators, with some operators offering flat-rate all-you-can-ear services to their customers.

In the content arena, the most popular type of service will be near-CD-quality audio downloads. There may be some offerings in the streaming audio market but I suspect that those will be very limited. The second most popular content service, in the mobile space, will be mobile video, with TV and user-created content (mobile YouTube and competitors) filling that gap. Those services will be advertising supported, with revenue sharing agreement between the mobile operators and the content providers.

Map services will also enjoy some level of success. The recent introduction of Google Maps on the Treo platform can be seen as an example of that trend and location-aware device will offer richer experiences in that space, with live traffic info, weather, and maybe some advertising being part of the offerings.

However, content will not take the forefront on mobile services, which will still be dominated by communication as the primary type of application. In that space, though, regular phone service will not be the predominant form of communication. SMS and MMS will be integrated with instant messaging platforms and email, to provide a complete communication package. Expect features like the ability to send text messages to multiple parties at once to start appearing, allowing for chat-like interfaces on phones.

As a result of those changes, social networks will also start integrating mobile applications more closely this year. MySpace and other networks like it will offer integrated solutions for mobile blogging, podcasting, and vlogging, as well as integrated chat and location aware social networking services. Dating services will be another arena to go mobile with the ability to identify matches within your general area.

Wrapping up the offerings will also be limited trials in the videophone space, leveraging off new next generation 3G infrastructures. The videophone trials (and 3G in general) will still be limited offerings by the end of the year, due to the high premium charged for such services.

On the voice end, the introduction of WiFi on some mobile devices will give rise to VoIP mobile applications. If the devices sport 802.11n receivers and such infrastructure is deployed, services around that space could eclipse traditional voice traffic.

Apple

Due to the added power mobile phones now have, the iPod is threatened. Apple makes a defensive move by unveiling the Apple ecosystem, centered around use of media in general and of the Apple iTunes store in particular. With the introduction of its own offering in the mobile space (an iPod with phone functionality and not a phone with iPod functionality) and in the living room (the already pre-announced iTV components), Apple presents a strategy that allows for simple integration of all their components into a digital lifestyle offering.

In the non-media space, Apple bundles blogs and wikis with the new version of OSX and starts offering Web 2.0-like functionality on its Xserve servers, in a bid to get a spot in enterprise racks. They will also merge in social networking features in their calendaring and address book applications, allowing for a more integrated experience.

In another bid for enterprise positioning, Apple will include virtualization of other Operating Systems natively in the next version of OSX, allowing their computers to run Windows and OSX applications side by side under OSX. The feature will take some of the existing Apple bootcamp attributes and turns them into an equivalent of Parallels.

In a surprise move, Apple will also announce that it has signed a partnership with Google, which will offer the Google Apps for your domain as a replacement for the .mac service offered by Apple. The service will now be available either as a free ad-supported service, or on the same premium service offering as before without ads.

On the hardware end, Apple will endorse 802.11n as their standard for media distribution, equipping all new computers and the iTV device with receiver cards so it can leverage off the higher speeds offered by that standard. Because of its long-standing relationship with Sony, the company will also decide to side with BlueRay as their standard for next-generation disks, equipping their new laptops with drives following that standard.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s oft-delayed Windows Vista will finally be released but adoption of the new operating system will be lackluster as few of today’s computers can support it. The same will be true of the release of Microsoft Office 2007, as most users feel perfectly OK with the version of those products they have running on their desktops.

With the major release of updates to the Windows and Office platforms behind it, the company will focus efforts in other areas. In the console market, Xbox 360 will become the dominant game platform, due to slow adoption of the PS3 platform. Microsoft will innovate heavily on that platform, leveraging its positioning in the living room to offer more movies, more TV shows and other types of services around it. Meanwhile, the company will also work on a major revision of their Zune offering, offering a new version of the iPod competitors that will be better received than its predecessor. However, Zune 2.0 will not make a major dent into the iPod market. On the web end, Microsoft will consider the acquisition of either Yahoo! or AOL as a way to shore up its MSN offering and adopt a more aggressive stance in its fight for online advertising revenue.

Virtual Currencies

There will be more talk about the digitization of money this year. Microsoft will use its Microsoft points as a new form of currency that can be used not only on the Zune marketplace and the Xbox live marketplace but also as a way to pay for goods and services online with approved merchants. This will be followed by support for a payment solution (like Google Payment or Paypal) in a stake to get a stronger foothold in that space.

Google will continue pushing its Google Payment engine, moving it to an international base before year end. Meanwhile Paypal will continue expanding its lead in the space and will start offering virtual credit card numbers that will be usable on any system and tie back to Paypal on the back-end.

But the big stories in the virtual currency space will be around the rise of virtual worlds like SecondLife and others, which will see their own virtual currencies rise against the dollar. Their will be discussion about the power those virtual worlds operators have over money flows and calls for regulations of those currencies (and possible taxation of revenue made in those virtual worlds) in several countries around the world.

Virtual Worlds

Speaking of virtual worlds, there will be a continuing explosion in the growth of this phenomenon. By year end, SecondLife alone will have over 15 millions residents, but will be experience growth pains. At least one other major virtual world operators will appear in the space but most corporations will rush to SecondLife.

The initial hype that started appearing in the mainstream press about SecondLife will give way to a number of negative stories, probably talking about some of the darker aspects of the virtual world phenomenons, including gold farming, the sex trade, and gambling. Some politician will use the negative press as a way to grab headline by calling for a government inquiry in the dealings of virtual worlds operators.

While I declared 2007 the year of mobile, virtual worlds will come of close second in terms of highlights for the year. I suspect that LindenLab will surprise people by announcing that it will open up its platform and present the underlying components as a new standard for the web. The company will then start offering their grid software as a standalone application that corporations can install on their own servers if they want more control. LindenLab will also allow companies to use customized version of their thick client that could be branded with company destinations and other goodies.

Due to LindenLab’s strength in the space, many companies will consider acquiring it but many will be turned off by all the negative press and potential for government involvement.

Media

Mainstream media will continue trying to co-opt successful bloggers and will also turn its attention to successful podcasters and vloggers. New stars will emerge online, develop followings there and make the jump to mainstream media, while the reverse path will be taken by mainstream reporters and actors, who will increasingly start vlogging and podcasting (they’re already blogging).

Pressured by lower viewership in their traditional timeslots, TV stations will start posting more content online, with at least one TV station offering all its primetime slate online in and advertising supported fashion. Smaller video distributors, in the meantime, will start investigating using bittorrent for distribution of their content. Some old TV show will see its archive fully posted online and will start receiving a new stream of revenue as a result of that online appearance.

Meanwhile, ad revenue will continue to shift to web, and media will reluctantly follow. By year end, most newspapers will have combined their print and online newsrooms, and many will be cutting back on print to focus more on their online presence. As part of this shift to online, we will also see increased reliance on user generated content, with some newspapers offering blogs to their readers and encouraging active participation in making the news.

However, most of those efforts will not generate the expected returns as Google gobbles up increasing share of overall internet ad revenue, and starts expanding to audio and video. Discussion in the traditional media will start shifting to whether Google is too powerful for everyone’s good.

Death of the website/webpage

Another important shift in the media space will be the death of the concept of traditional website or web page as a result of increasing consumption of content via RSS or through distribution of widgets that can be embedded in other people’s sites. People will move away from the term web site and start talking about web properties. Because content will not necessarily be consumed in the creator’s site, there will be discussions of a new for new advertising/revenue models for such content and a need for new metrics to identify reach and audience. This will present a new opportunity for companies in the web analytics space.

As the web page is no longer seen as the best way to measure the success of a web property, the CPM will be on its last gasp as a model for selling online advertising, replaced largely by cost per click (CPC) and increasingly by cost per action (CPA) as the way to sell ads online.

Web 2.0

There will be increasing verticalisation in the web 2.0 space, with social networks, search, and web service offerings becoming more focused this year. However, this will also mean that many companies that were only single features will not be able to adapt and will die. Others will continue to be acquired for sums in the under $100 million category and few, if any, will go public.

Tagging will become more and more implicit, with less and less users actually doing the tagging and more and more tags being generated algorithmically. More applications will start looking at people’s behavior and creating the appropriate tags or making the appropriate modifications in the background.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for web 2.0 as Enterprise 2.0 becomes a reality. Use of blogs, wikis and VoIP behind the firewall commonplace at most large corporations and other technologies introduced as part of web 2.0 (AJAX, podcasting, etc…) will become more common in Global 100 corporations.

And speaking of the enterprise space, enterprise search will be huge, with Fast and/or Autonomy being acquired by Oracle, HP, or Microsoft. More focused will be paid on creating strong search solutions for the unstructured data on intranets and IBM will be a major player in the space.

Conclusion

At year end, many of those predictions will be wrong but a few will be correct. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep everyone up to date and hopefully will keep providing great content throughout the rest of the year.

I think 2007 will be another banner year and believe that we are looking at another existing set of new developments. Feel free to comment below and tell me what you think I may have missed (or point me to other prognostications, as I haven’t had time to get to my aggregator since Christmas).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2007 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

5. Data Mining/Research

A main attribute of social networks is how much data people provide to them. On top of it, this data and the interaction of users on those networks. This is rich fodder for data mining. For example, researchers recently used Where’s George, a website tracking dollar bills in the real world, to assess how disease spreads. Similarly, LinkedIn provides its users with demographic/geographic data about members of your social network.

Traditional companies spend millions of dollars trying to understand the flow of people, flow of ideas (or memes) and how to exploit them. From Milgram’s small world experiment to the success of “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, there has been a fairly large body of research in this area but, for what may be the first time in history, there is now a heavy trove of data that can be analyzed.

4. Problem Solving

Sites like Google Answers are working on providing better answers to questions. Add-in some social network glue and one could be able to figure whether the person is a subject matter expert in the area he/she is answering the question about. For example, you might want to trust an individual with strong network ties in technology on questions related to technology but might be a little more wary of answers that person would provide about medical care (and similarly, you might trust a doctor more about medical care than you would a computer geek). Social networks, when seen through the lens of expertise, can provide quick access to answers from subject matter experts in one area. It is impossible to know everything but you might have a friend of a friend of a friend who has the answer in a specific area you are researching.

Similarly, social networks can provide a way to get social matter experts to connect and work collectively on difficult problems. When combined with digg–like features, social networks could become a way to speed up the vetting process on scientific publications by allowing a large set of peers to review articles and rank them according to value. This, in itself, could help humanity make radical moves forward in the area of scientific research.

Take, for example, my friends at ACOR who have been thinking of developing, in partnership with the National Cancer Institute, a data-mining system that analyzes information about patients to identify potential root cause for different cancers. Here, we see social networks (in this case, via mailing lists that are finely targeted) potentially being useful to help advance science and hopefully discover some root causes for cancer. A set of tools to such granular community could help a scientist, for example, sent a questionnaire to a sub-segment of the population to test a hypothesis (eg. “let’s see if people who have skin cancer and drank more than 1 glass of milk a day are reacting better to this type of drug?”) before deciding to do a clinical trial. If a specialized social network for such community was created, there might be no end to how much data could be gathered. Thing of it as a shotgun approach to medicine.   

3. Marketing

Marketing, off course, is all about deep knowledge of the audience. The best way to market a message is to discover what motivates people and how to craft the message to match the motivations. When combined with the database of intentions, a social network can work as a set of focus groups for messages. Testing different messages on a narrow audience can allow people to better market their products.

2. Reputation Management

The old adage is that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know“ is at the core of social networking. As more and more people are online and more and more interactions are happening between people with weak ties, assessing a person’s reputation is increasingly important. LinkedIn has keyed in on that effort by giving people the ability to “endorse” members of their social network, providing more information about how a person performed in a particular job. In a similar fashion, profiles no Ebay allow buyers and sellers to assess the track record of a buyer or seller before making a transaction. Endorsements by one’s strong ties generally reflects much higher than by someone you don’t know. Thus, social networks can work as the glue to reputation management. It is not enough for people to know that a person is seen as important by some random stranger but when one discovers that their friends or colleagues have endorsed a particular individual, they tend to trust those opinions more heavily.

Let’s take a pedestrian example: imagine you need to get some electrical work done in your house but don’t know any electricians. By looking at your social network, you could find such an expert with ease as the best electrician might be linked to your friends. In a way, social networks are just an extension of asking people for recommendations. Which brings me to the last opportunity on this list.

1. Recommendation

Recommendation is a very powerful driver to decision making: whether it is for hiring a person, picking a new product, or finding a general direction, humans tend to look to their existing network and do a subconscious “most-like” analysis of the information they receive. For example, Amazon has been very successful with the “people who bought this also bought…” and “people who looked at this also looked at…” features. As they gather more data, patterns emerge.

Similar approaches can be taken into the search space (where what people linked to or clicked on is ranked higher than other stuff) and in other areas like music (last.fm comes to mind) or other media consumption (for example, the success of aggregator like Digg, techmeme or tailrank can be attributed in large part to the need people have to know what other people think is good).

Conclusion

Social Networks should not really be a set of standalone tools but they are essential to building the next set of applications that leverage the power of the crowds. As such, social networking should be a feature and not an end-goal until itself. The companies that understand this basic rule will be the ones that succeed in that space, leveraging opportunities created by social networks in a fashion that will provide unprecedented benefits.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 5 opportunities around social networks. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

5. Viral Nature

They key to social networks quickly moving up in size is their viral nature. Because people who get on those need to expand their network, they invite their friends. And those friends, in turn, invite their friends. The viral nature of a new social network is an important part to making it succeed.

Some networks have taken the model one step further by being “by invitation only”. Initially, this represents a certain level of exclusivity, with people then trying to get in. This exclusivity breaks down, though, if the social networks do not have a mechanism to slow down or limit the number of new invitations going out. All it takes to tear down that sense of exclusivity is for one person to start inviting hordes of people. 

4. Online Identity

Not everyone has a personal website. It may come as a shock to most of my readers but, for some people, social networks personal pages are the only place where people maintain an identity. Some, like MySpace, have capitalized on that effect by providing tools that allow to enhance those profiles in ways that make them indistinct from personal sites, beyond the fact that the URL is on the service instead of being a personal one. 

3. Enhanced Knowledge

When used properly, social networks can be a great way to enhance knowledge. Tapping into one’s social network can allow for people to fill an information gap if members of their extended social network have deep subject matter expertise in a certain area. At the current time, few social networking sites have used that capability but, I believe this is one of the most useful aspects of social networking sites. 

2. Basic human need to share

The proliferation of blogs have shown that people love to share their opinion. The proliferation of the open source movement shows that some people love to share their expertise. I think there is a deeply rooted need among human beings to share, whether it is information or opinions. Social networks appeal to the altruistic side of people by allowing them to share their connection and introduce friends to other friends. 

1. Basic human need to connect

Most of all, though, human beings are social creatures. As such, the root of all success from social networking sites is based on a need to connect and expand connections. For most of history, connections were largely limited by geographical or economic considerations. Social networks allow people to expand their connections around interests. This first appeared with the rise of Usenet and bulletin boards, where members formed communities around specific interests and has now expanded into the social networking realm, where people can find out more about people who are most like them. 

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 5 reasons why social networks can succeed. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

So without further ado, here are five reasons why social networks fail: 

5. Privacy concerns 

The first reason I would highlight, and part of the reason why social networks have not really gained much traction outside of a self-selected group of people is the amount of privacy concerns that exist within certain age groups. Younger people are generally more immune to those but older people tend to worry about what the social networks in question do with their data and are worried that they will either be data mined or that they will suffer from identity theft. This anxiety has largely been driven by media emphasis on how your data on the Internet is unsafe and how there are “nefarious characters” running around the net. 

4. No real reward or penalty system 

Most social networks are putting a heavy emphasis on how many connection a user have. A user’s worth is based on his/her number of connection, not on the quality of those connections. This tends to drive a lot of people to try to connect to as many people as they can. Mary Hodder likens this effort to collecting baseball cards, an apt metaphor since the number of connections you have is no guarantee of the value of those connections.   

However, few of the social networking sites are doing anything to gate the amount of connection. One of the nice thing on asmallworld is that it actually penalizes people for sending out invitations that were declined. I believe this is a good thing as it makes people rethink whether they want to attempt a connection or not. 

The other question is the reward in social networking: what do I get for sharing my contacts? We know what the companies get but it’s sometimes fuzzier to see what extra value one gets from a social network. Some have done a good job at showing a sense of mission, whether it is job-related and expertise-related connectivity like connections LinkedIn or dating like… well, this is where it gets trickier.

3. Not granular enough

Context is generally missing from most social networks. For example, I may know Bob in a social context as a friend but I have no idea of how good an employee he is. Or I may know Joe in a work context but not realize that he’s not dating material for my friends. The lack of granularity as to the types of relationships is another current failure of most social networking sites.

The other thing that is missing from social network is a more fine-tuned approach to ranking relationships. Relationships are not binary. It’s not either someone is my friend or not. The truth of the matter is that relationships are very granular in nature: I may be a close friend to John, whom I’ve known for 20 years and hang out with on a daily basis and I may have been a friend with Peter in the past but haven’t seem him in 10 years. Yet, to a social network, if I added both of them as friends, we have the same types of relationships.

Similarly, there seems to be a trigger missing for evolving relationships: what if my relationship with Peter has been slowly degrading over time. Do I kick him out as a friend (an option few networks allow) or do I keep him on my list. This granularity is missing and it is odd that it doesn’t exist as it would be relatively easy to capture this data.

Situational relevance is another factor that is largely ignored by social networks today: in what context does that network function. It’s something that needs to be more granularly defined than the catch-all approach of existing implementations.

2. Not integrated with other apps

Should social networks be standalone apps or is social networking just a feature? There is really little value in knowing people just for the sake of knowing people. However, there is value in interfacing with those people, whether it is to find a job, get some information from a subject matter expert, find money, or get a new date.

I believe the real value of social network sites to the end user will eventually be discovered when they start integrating with other components like email and IM. Presence (is the person online or not), location services (where in the physical world is the person right now) and communication (can I phone/IM/email/page them now) would add greatly to the value of social networks.

However, at the current time, few efforts have been made to integrate the social networks with other apps. Which brings me to the biggest reason why social networks fail: 

1. Walled Gardens

At the end of the day, social networking sites are walled gardens. They do not want to share information with others for fear that it will dilute their power as THE central hub for all relationships. This lack of interoperability is the primary problem with social networking sites and, I believe, one of the reason why their growth is impeded. A network that would be willing to open up could see better integration with other tools and could benefit from other sites connecting to it and creating more specialized sub-networks. For example, a large social networking site could become a large repository of a number of relationships with smaller sites looking at it to specialize across horizontal uses (for example, creating a site focused on dating or job search) or vertical ones (for example, a site focused on information exchange between subject matter experts within one particular domain)

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 5 reasons why social networks fail. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Broadband penetration

Broadband penetration will continue to increase in the United States and Europe. Large scale deployments of city-wide broadband efforts in several large cities will start making internet access similar to phone or electric service, widespread and the type of thing few people think of. On the bleeding edge of the Internet access development world, some large scale networks, most probably coming from phone companies, will break the 10-Mbps barrier and close in on the 100-Mbps speed, making internet access on par with regular local network access.

The downside of this widespread deployment of high-speed internet access will be in the phone industry, where next generation (3G) rollouts of high speed wireless networks will prove costly and offer lackluster service considering its high price. This will force a drastic reduction in prices towards the end of the year or early 2007, in an attempt to recover some revenue from the large investments.

Implications of increased broadband penetration

The increase in broadband penetration will have several large implications, including the rollout of more voice over IP services, video services, and the infrastructure security.

Voice Over IP

Voice over IP will continue to see widespread deployment and large phone companies will start migrating their full networks to IP-based traffic. This will make VoIP the primary form of telephone communication for wired lines by the end of 2006, though few people will be aware of the change as it will largely happen behind the scenes, not touching people’s independent system.

Telephony services will increase as the VoIP phenomenon continues to increase. Expect early efforts in video telephony to start rolling out and becoming more mainstream towards the end of the year. Also expect to see the rise of wireless devices that can bridge the gap between computer and regular telephony, providing access to the network in a number of different ways.

Video

Video over IP will be very hot in 2006, with several major changes in the industry. First will be the announcement, by Apple, of its new mac-mini intel-powered platform designed specifically for the living room. Following on the success of the iPod, Apple will market the device less as a computer and more as a video consumption tool that will include stunning high definition resolution and will offer direct access to the iMedia store (formerly known as the iTunes music store) where one will be able to download movies and TV shows, as well as content created by amateurs.

Google, in partnership with AOL (and its sister companies within the Time-Warner world), will offer a pay-per-view system, mirroring some of the iMedia store offerings. The system will be available both in the AOL closed garden client (where it will use some level of acceleration to speed up delivery) and on the web through a new client package offered by Google and largely developed by the AOL client software team. The strength of the move will generate enough positive buzz for AOL that Time-Warner will be able to spin-off the unit and will be considering an IPO towards the beginning of 2007.

Seeing their advertising revenues eroding, TV stations will start offering more content online, also sponsored by advertising. New types of online video ad insertion and tracking system will be created by several companies, with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! offering aggregated model based on something similar to Google AdWords but offering not only targeting based on keywords but also based on certain demographic information.

New video aggregators will start appearing, offering a way to customize your own TV station. Some will be acquired by the major portals (unless the portals themselves have already developed that capability by the time this trend manifests itself). Meanwhile, Tivo will recast itself as one of those portals and will be acquired by Microsoft and merged with MSNTV (unless it is acquired by Sony, and merged with the PlayStation 3, or Panasonic, and kept as a standalone.)

Having lost in the bidding war for Tivo, Yahoo! will decide to acquire NetFlix and merge it with some of its video offerings, providing not only distribution of DVDs but also online streaming of content.

On the strength of revenues from online ads, some small cable or local TV stations will start offering their complete programming slate online, for free, and adverting supported. This will rankle a few of the cable companies and syndicators who looked to those companies as another revenue stream. Meanwhile, on the same basis, most local TV news will be available online for free through an advertising supported model. During one major story, a local TV station’s feed will compete with the national networks in terms of reporting, as more viewers flood its website than watch the same story unfold on television.

The competition for those types of stories will continue to increase, as citizen journalism provides raw unscripted video of events. Videocasting, following on the success of podcasting, will start seeing some traction with a few podcasting and vidcasters signing deals with traditional media. Traditional media will look at it as an interesting set of development but one that ultimately won’t be trusted by the public because they do not have the right seal of approval; their prediction will turn out to be wrong.

Infrastructure

The rise of broadband and the increasing numbers of basic services running on the internet infrastructure will give rise to fear that the infrastructure is under-protected. From a technical policy viewpoint, electronic infrastructures will become a major national security matter with fears that the very openness of the internet could represent a large security risk. This will be seized upon by the network providers (phone companies, cable companies) and some security consultants as a way to push for policy that will allow those incumbent communications services to administer their networks with tighter control, with decision as to what they are willing to let run on the network and what they are not willing to. A subsequent battle will ensue as VoIP companies and media companies will complain about the network providers squeezing them out. No decision on any of this will be made in 2006 but the debate will continue through 2007 and beyond.

Growth and Scalability

2006 will be an explosive year in the Web 2.0 sphere. Explosive because it will see triple if not quadruple digit growth in number of users but also explosive because it will see several popular sites unable to deal with the capacity issues relating to that explosion.

On the RSS end, the explosion in growth will really start when Internet Explorer 7.0 becomes a priority upgrade on windows stations. The inclusion of some RSS feeds as defaults in the browser will prove to be too much for some sites which had not expected the onslaught of millions of new hits. Readership from RSS readers will increase as more users realize that they can get their favorite sites delivered to them instead of going out and checking to see if they are updated.

As more people discover RSS, more of them will start valuing blogs and many will start their own. However, the concept of becoming a professional blogger will decrease as many people who thought they could make money off their blog will find that the effort in doing so was higher than they had expected and will abandon their blog.

Meanwhile, other web 2.0 subjects will fail: Tagging services like del.icio.us will be see as too complicated by the general public (although they will continue to thrive in the more geeky world) but tagging of pictures (as in Flickr) will continue to grow. Most blog networks will fail to attain the amount of traffic required to play seriously in the advertising world and will be forced to either merge or shut down. Meanwhile, companies offering only a set of web services with the idea to generate revenue solely from advertising may find themselves in a bind as advertising revenue will fail to grow at the same pace as the new offerings.

Implications of Growth

The explosive growth in traffic see during 2006 has implications across a number of players in the blogging world and metadata space. It also has implications in terms of scalability, business, and trust.

Blogging, podcasting, vidcasting

As blogging takes better hold in the mainstream (your parents WILL be blogging), the number of subscribers per individual blog feed will drop into the low teens, with blogs being read by close family members and friends only. A few breakout blogs, specializing on particular narrow subjects will manage to increase their readership but the world will largely consolidate around less than 1,000 major blogs: of those, the vast majority will not be from any members of the Technorati 100 or any other such list. The vast majority of those mainstream blogs will be the ones created by mainstream media outlets, which will use their existing reach to heavily promote their own blog.

Radio stations will increasingly start offering podcasts and TV stations will offering vidcasts. Most, however, will do so through centralized hosting capabilities provided by their parent companies. Smaller podcasters and vidcasters will have a hard time to compete with those larger companies as they are forced to look into ways to support their own bandwidth costs and will sign contracts with hosting services promising a share of advertising revenue in exchange for doing the hosting: that share will largely go to the hosting service with many podcasters/vidcasters finding they are not really making more than a few 100 dollars a months from all their hard work.

Crash and Burn

One of the hosting services will crash in a major way, taking with it a few days worth of the hard work of thousands of people who were hosting on it. The provider will initially recover but suffer a subsequent crash that will seal its fate as a doomed company. The majority of its users will leave and join one of the larger hosting services provided by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Beyond the hosting world, scalability will also be a hot buzzword as more services, ranging from RSS hosting providers like FeedBurner to search engines like Technorati and Feedster to analytics providers like Google and MeasureMap will experience temporary failures and growth pains.

The cost of upgrading the service infrastructure will be too much to bear for some companies, which will be forced to shutter their door, sell out, or merge with a similar service. Meanwhile, many web-based service companies will fail to generate enough advertising revenue to continue upgrading. A flurry of mergers and closures will happen over a few months, leading people to wonder if this is bubble bust 2.0.

The downside of all those fears about a bust will be in the increased number of negative stories about technology in the mainstream media. Stories will mention the hubris of web 2.0 founders and will showcase Google as a typical example of this hubris, highlighting its free lunches and other things that were thought cool in 205: As a result of all those negative stories (and others but more on that later), Google will loose several billions (possibly even tens of billions) of dollars from the high of its market capitalization, shedding anywhere from 10 to 25 percent off its high.

After the consolidation, there will only be one or two independent players in each of the following (notwithstanding the fact that there will also be offering from the bigger portal players): blog hosting , vlog hosting, podcast hosting (WordPress and Typepad will either be the two in these three sectors or will have merged), blog search, social networks (speaking os social networks, Yahoo! or Microsoft will buy LinkedIn (if it’s Microsoft, LinkedIn will quickly be integrated with Outlook and offer Plaxo-like features).

Meanwhile, a sector which will have been decimated will be tagging. Following slow adoption by the mainstream, largely due to the complexity of adding tags to pages, many tagging companies will fail. Tagging, as a concept, however, will remain and be adopted by most major search engines: as Metadata entry is simplified with the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 12 (both of which will be delivered by Microsoft to a relatively lukewarm market), and tagging becomes a browser feature, it stops being a differentiator.

Trust is hot topic

Fear of Google knowing a little too much about people will bring a slate of bad press for a company that was the darling of the mainstream media in 2005. The introduction of its Google finance service, hooking up into people’s bank accounts and payments systems will be seen as the company becoming too large a player, with fear of it becoming a monopoly. The backlash will first start in silicon Valley, with many tech luminaries starting to tear down the company. It will continue with publications that were once its biggest cheerleader becoming its biggest detractor. As a result, many of the companies that relied on Google for key services (advertising, analytics) will try to distance themselves from it and start looking for other providers (meanwhile, companies looking for funding will excise Google from their business plans, in order to avoid being associated with it by VCs). Yahoo! will pick up some of the adsense/adwords business, along with Microsoft, which will offer a similar service.

Meanwhile, in the analytics space, new companies will be formed and attract a lot of venture capital. Many of them will offer ways to opt-out of their tracking and some will offer added incentive to people willing to provide them with more information. New models in the space will emerge and at least one player will provide a revolutionary approach that will change the analytics landscape.

In the blogosphere too, trust will be a major subject as some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues surrounding defamation of character, libel, accuracy, and reliability after a top-name blogger is sued for something he/she said or linked to. Furthermore, some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues relating to invasion of privacy as they become more famous in the mainstream media.

On the Wikipedia end, anonymous editing will be abandoned after the revelation of a major hack altering minor facts over several months in an automated fashion has rendered a core version of the wikipedia unusable. The wikipedia trustee will revert wikipedia to an earlier date, erasing all changes performed during that period of times and destroying several significant entries on 2006 current events. The mainstream press will pile on about the inaccuracies of wikipedia, bringing back earlier scandals as proof that no information on the internet can be trusted unless it comes from a reliable source (incidentally presented as being a member of the media establishment).

Conclusion

In late 2006, a substantial portion of these predictions will be wrong and some may turn out to be dead on (although most of the ones mentioning companies by name will most probably be wrong).

Meanwhile, on a personal level, 2006 will be a year of big changes. However, I promise it will also be a year of continued writing on TNL.net, even if it is at the same substantial post every week or two rate that readers have gotten accustomed to. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2006 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Solid Integration

The first thing that is apparent is that this is more than just a blogging package or social network one. From the name to the way one’s web page is integrated with other parts of Yahoo!, it is clear that this is a longer term play with attempts at integration.

While some integration points are pretty solid (Yahoo! messenger, Yahoo! Launch, Yahoo! local, and the Yahoo! photo service seem well integrated), others are major misses. For example, why is it that this service has a different mailbox than my already existing Yahoo! mailbox? (and does that mean I now need to check mail in two accounts?) Going further, why are services like Yahoo profile and Geocities not integrated in this? It seems they would be natural integration point and yet they are nowhere to be seen. Last but not least is the main question about integration of my.yahoo and “My page” on this service. There should be another natural point of integration there, shouldn’t there be?

Basic blogging

The blogging platform, though light on features, seems pretty solid. The authoring interface is clean and uncluttered and presents a
public blog that has the most basic of blog features: entries, permalink, blogroll, RSS, and comments. This is far from earth-shattering and blogger still offers a richer experience as a whole but this could be a good starter kit. In a way, it has the same feel as similar offerings from AOL and MSN so I doubt Yahoo! will unseat Blogger with this offering.

Worries about copyrights

More worrisome, however, is the RSS feed. I took a look at it was a bit annoyed by the URL structure for it but that was the least of my worries. When I looked inside is when I made the decision that I would never use the 360 blog for anything serious. My reason was in the code of the RSS feed where the following appeared:
Copyright 2005, Yahoo!

I looked at this and thought that maybe I had misread the
terms of services when I signed up. So I went to read them again and found the following

8. CONTENT SUBMITTED OR MADE AVAILABLE FOR INCLUSION ON THE SERVICEYahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service.

How could it be then, that the content of my RSS channel is copyrighted by Yahoo!? I’m not sure but I thing it’s good enough a reason to steer clear of using this service. The service may offer some interesting stuff (for example, closer inspection revealed that moblogging is possible) but do I really want to give my copyright to Yahoo! In a world where large media corporations are trying to get more and more control over the content they own, one has to be careful about the content they give to those large corporations.

Social Networking

The social network component looks like every other social networks out there. As a late entrant into the game, I don’t know how much play Yahoo! will get out of this as people get what I would consider “social network fatigue” which is a disease which symptoms are very simple: if you’re tired of having to invite people to another social network, you’re suffering from it. I now have accounts on Orkut, LinkedIn, Ryze, Friendster and a few others: what more will Yahoo! offer me and how can I get my contact from one of those into the others easily? What we need is an aggregator of social networks (or an agreement between the different social networks to work on a common format so that if I have a relationship with one person on a social network, the other social network would recognize that link and not force me to re-invite the person). When I have a social relationship with a person, I do not have to contact them every time I use a different device. It seems that, as social networks proliferate, the individual value of the concept is dropping further and further.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Looking around Yahoo! 360. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Apple

Scored well on the introduction of the Apple mini, which represents Apple’s entry into the lower end market. However, no video iPod this year, only a photo one, leaving Apple far, far, away from the movie downloading world.

On the computer end, Apple did not introduce a G5 portable. Wishful thinking on my part, true, and still a wish I hope to see fulfilled in 2005.

Convergence: Music Stores

As expected, Apple has solidified its relationship with AOL, offering the iTunes store under an AOL login. However, the store is not fully integrated within the AOL service.

As predicted, the world of online music is now divided into two camps: AAC and Windows Media. However, the surprising move was from Real Networks, which was the first company beyond Apple to adopt the AAC format.

Convergence: Voice Over IP

As predicted, voice over IP has had tremendous growth in 2004. AT&T’s exit from the consumer market can be seen as a move to reorganize around land-line offerings. Also of significance this year was the introduction of VoIP services from most of the big telco player.

Regulatory discussions are now exploding, with telcos pushing for deregulation as “a way to compete” against the new players in the field. At the same time, the same traditional companies are pushing for regulation of VoIP businesses.

Wireless: Wi-Fi phones

Dead wrong on that one. Maybe next year!

While WiFi continues to progress at high speed, the introduction of phone services using such service is limited.

Business: Revenge of the Internet companies

Google did its IPO as expected and that went very well. Other Internet companies also went public this year but one can hardly talk of coattail effect.

On the bright side for investors, my predictions about the decline in stock prices for the big players did not pan out. However, I still maintain that the stock prices of companies like Ebay, yahoo, and amazon are too high.

Business; Sun in Trouble

As expected, SUN continues to have trouble financially but I have to admit I was wrong in terms of what I expected them to do. They are still in the SPARC business and are still pushing Solaris as their main OS.

Development: Standards at the forefront

This one was an easy one. As sites like ESPN and Wired moved to new standard formats, more and more people and companies are getting interested in more standard compliant code. Not a headline grabber but definitely a strong move.

Society: Social Networks at the core

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Social networks were slowly moving but not really getting more important this year. Their integration with search could, however, yield great potentials.

Politics: Internet comes of age

The Internet did come of age in this election cycle but Howard Dean did not win the democratic candidacy. However he, and other groups, managed to use the Internet to mobilize millions of people. The Republicans, on the other side, used the power of conservative bloggers to attack candidates (for example, the Swiftboat veterans for truth) and then take on the establishment (Dan Rather and Memogate).

Coming Soon: My predictions for 2005!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2004 predictions: Recap. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before moving on, let me state that I do not consider myself an expert on that many subject. For example, I can probably talk about the intricacies of XHTML and WAI but I do not consider myself an expert in those areas as far as I see it: I do understand the specifications, do know how to implement them, and know what most hardcore geeks would know about them. Because of the people I surround myself with (my social network (more on that later)), I consider myself literate in the subject but would defer to other people if looking for true expertise.

What’s expertise?

Dictionary.com says that an an expert is

A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject

. Under that definition, an expert could generally be seen as someone who knows more than the average person about a particular subject. So, in order to be an expert, one has to be on top of a subject and, if that subject evolves, on top of changes in that field or subject. Such a definition seems to point to the need for proper information gathering and the creation of a continuous loop to keep on top of data. So the question then becomes “How do you get information about different subjects and stay on top of latest developments in those subject areas?”. To answer this, one must analyze the patterns of information he/she processes and define sources.

Information gathering

On a day to day basis, we are receptors for a lot of information. For example, I get my pointers from print publications, radio, books, weblogs, news sites, email lists, personal email messages, and RSS feed on a daily basis. I rarely watch television as the broadcast model is one that often disturb me (it does too in terms of radio) because it requires that I be in a particular location at a particular time in order to catch a program. PVR system like Tivo are interesting in that they allow for some level of time-shifting but I’m finding that as far as return on time investment, video does little compared to text. As a result, I am living in a world where text is king, mostly coming to me in the form of digital bits going through my browser.

My information tools are relatively simple:

• Email: I use several email clients throughout my day, ranging from browser-based clients like the one offered by Spamcop to the one available on my Treo, to the one available on my computers. Important to me in terms of email is the ability to sort messages by threads so I can follow the progression of discussions at a glance, a very useful feature if you are dealing with several hundred pieces of email daily.
• Aggregator: For the longest time, I went back and forth on RSS aggregators as I find most of them to be lacking in some way or other. Most of my problem arose from the simple concept of synchronizing data. Tools like Radio Userland and Net News Wire are great if you are using a single computing device throughout the day but fail if you are switching back and forth between multiple ones. As a result, I’ve now settled on Bloglines, a great web-based aggregator that allows me to keep all my feeds organized in different folders and keeps me up on changes across all of the feed. This has been a huge time-saver, probably cutting 3–4 hours out of my daily routine of looking for new information.
• Instant Messaging: I have yet to find a solution that actually works well in terms of instant messaging as I have problems finding a solution that could work on my work computer, home computer, and mobile device (yes, my Treo is part of what I consider the information universe I live in). What I would look for is something that would allow me to recall any conversation I’ve had in IM and search all that data. For now, I still consider IM to be a black hole in my information universe.

Those tools, however, form the basis of what I call the information universe. They are, if you want, the plumbing that allows me to get my info.

Social Networks and Expertise

Step two in analyzing my information diet is to figure out what the sources are. The tools I listed above are great in an of themselves but completely useless if no traffic goes into them. This is where social networks tie in. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a number of very smart people at different Internet conferences. Those people now represent the first rung on my social network when it comes to technology. Talking with them over email and IM, I can now get a good idea as to what they are up to, what they consider important, and what they see as issues coming up over the horizons. Weblogs, however, are going one step further, allowing me in some way to extend my social network.

Blogs and expertise

Because blogs are largely based on conversations, they increase the level of interactivity one has with interesting people. Using the plumbing provided by RSS (Thanks to the efforts of people like Dave Winer), one can get a good idea as to what’s going on in the blogosphere. With services like Technorati, people can track who is hot in the blogosphere. With services like Blogdex,Daypop, and Popdex, one can track what is hot in the blogosphere.

What those services allow you to do is basically mine the collective minds of thousands of bloggers and, much in the same way Google has used PageRank to figure what were the best URLs for a given keywords or set of keywords are, figuring out what people are talking about. While Clay Shirky may argue that the power laws distort those results, one could argue that looking at the sourcing of links is often as interesting as looking at what links are pointed to. From there, one can find some interesting commentary. Because of the ease of use of RSS aggregators, one can then try out a new commentator for a few hours, days, weeks and then decide whether that person is worth following.

So what does this have to do with expertise, you might start asking. Well, for starters, I’ve gone through and identified a few people who are considered interesting by the blog world (ie. the blogerati). Those people in turns can turn you on to other people who cover similar topics. For example, a big thing in the blog space is political blogs. I personally don’t care that much for them so those blogs are not among the ones I read. However, I do read a fair amount about technical issues and some of the people I read do speak about the intersection of politics and technology, a subject that does interest me. Over time, I have developed a list of bloggers I do read frequently, people whom I trust as experts on a particular subject. For example, I read Adrian Holovaty’s blog to get a better idea of what good newspaper sites are doing, and I read Alan Reiter’s blog to get info on development in wireless. Because of reading those two blogs, my knowledge on two very narrow fields is increased. And because I use an aggregator, I get notified only when changes are happening to their sites.

Blogs and new experts

Similarly, when a new subject crops up, I first do a Google search but, more and more often, I now also do a Feedster search in an attempt to get more context. The secret sauce in all of this is RSS, a small easy to use protocol that sits at the core of the weblog world. Where it not for this tool, I would still have to visit sites one by one and go through thousands of Google pages to find the proper page. Because blogs are based largely on linking and commenting on links, the blog worlds provides me with some context about a particular link. This, in turns, allows me to more quickly grasps new concepts.

I am not alone in this. This kind of concept sits at the core of what the blog world is about. Because blogs generate conversation amongst bloggers, pockets of expertise are arising. The mass media are now being surprised by the rise of people who are moving from blogs to mainstream media but shouldn’t be. After all, the deep secret of many in traditional media is that expertise is something that one acquires over time by covering a particular subject. The links one makes with sources are established by doing story after story in a particular area of expertise. That’s exactly what bloggers are now doing and that is why blogs are representing such a revolutionary thing in information dispersal and in expertise building.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Blogs and Expertise. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.