Technologies/Products that will make an impact in 2009
New Year is always the time for resolutions (that usually fail), year recaps (that are too easy) and next year predictions (that again usually fail), so I decided to make couple of predictions of my own about technologies that I think would make impact next year, just to test my hit/miss ratio – it’s fun to look at these at the end of the year as there is lot to learn from mistakes too 
Given that I work in Interactive Media, my focus will be on the technologies affecting that field. So, here is the list:
Touch Screen, large display mobile devices will replace computers as primary Internet information retrieval devices within 2-3 years:
iPhone was the killer app and with with wi-fi coverage and 3G adoption growing, and iPhone clones popping up every day(BlackBerry, Android, Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile?), large touch screens will become mainstream and this post-desktop/laptop interactive world will explode like Facebook did 2 years ago.
Users will adopt them quickly and happily – there’s not much learning curve in switching from using 10 fingers and a mouse on a 6lb brick to using a thumb on a pocket device. In fact, I believe there is high probability that mobile OS-es like iPhone and Android will start showing up as an option on consumer laptops.
All the information you need will now really be at your fingertip and advertisers will have to adopt as it will be much more difficult to squeeze in all those display ads from regular browser pages.
Single Login:
Users don’t want separate user id, password and profile pic for every site they need to register on, but they also don’t want the same id for job searching as for sharing party photos with friends.
There have been several false starts in this area – Microsoft’s Passport (in retrospect, visionary) 10 years ago and Sun’s response to it (Liberty Alliance). Most recently OpenID – despite endorsements by all big players OpenID’s adoption has been disappointing – partly because it’s still complicated, people don’t understand it, and partly because it only offers single id and password. What about friends, activities, notifications etc. There’s just not enough perceived value in it.
But recent launch of Facebook Connect convinced me that the next year will be the year of id consolidation, not necessarily into one, but several IDs that the user will use depending on the context. FB Connect is simple and very useful: you can use your FB login, profile pic, social graph and you can broadcast your activities from associated sites onto your FB wall. Most importantly, it’s easy to understand, implement and it works!
Of course FB will not be alone here – Google is already offering competing product Friend Connect (although not nearly as polished) and big players like Microsoft with LiveID, Yahoo with YahooID will be following soon with similar offerings.
In any case, consolidation will happen – killer app in this area has emerged (FB Connect) and the competition is heating up – it will be up to busnesses to choose from the available options: overly complicated OpenID, too proprietary and personal Facebook ID…
There is one obstacle to this id consolidation: willingness of sites to share their user databases. They may not have a choice if the users overwhelmingly adopt these services.
Social Activity Aggregation
Consolidation will inevitably happen in social media, but there will still be several major services people will use in parallel, so there is a need for consolidated feed of activities across them. Whether FriendFeed grows or Facebok or MS Live, Google or Yahoo adopt their aggregation functionality remains to be seen.
Search:
I actually have no facts to support the claim that anything will change here: semantic search engines have been a big buzzword, but apps haven’t lived up to the hype so far – still many questions need to be answered: RDF or Microformats…
Will people bother to invest to change sites when Google is just good enough and there is no big semantic search engine that can impact their revenue? I deliberately didn’t list semantic search as a separate item for next year as impact is unclear to me unless a breakthrough happens.
Google Search has become Internet Explorer 6! They have no competition at the moment, so very little motivation to innovate or change – it’s become boring and it’s time for it to become disrupted with something. But I don’t know what…
Cloud
Big word that means a lot of things, and while infrastructure part is slowly becoming mainstream, next level services are showing promise in accelerating application development and reuse (data, queue services etc.) from Azure and Amazon. It’s still in the infancy and as long as it’s easier to build an app with your desktop version of Ruby on Rails than using cloud services, there is no incentive to use them. But they will get there, although 09 sounds overly optimistic.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon will likely continue to be main players.
Hosted Productivity Apps
I mentioned them already in my post about 2008, but this year they will become mainstream: Google Docs and Zoho Apps are already , MS Office online and Hosted Exchange are coming soon. All of which means that the competition will really heat up and the products will become better.
Flash Intros will make a big comeback!
This time around with even more sizzle and options: site owners will be able to build useless 10 second animation in Flash OR Silverlight.
Nanoblogging
Twitter will become thing of the past as users will realize that 140 character limit is too large to express a meaningful and coherent thought. The new way of expression will develop: nanoblogging, with character limit of 1, users will hit random characters on keyborad to instantly express their thoughts and opinions and react to current events. O!
Well, that’s my list for now -I’m sure there will be new surprises and changes, but without them, where would the fun be? By the way, in case you didn’t notice, last two entries were a joke
L8R
D.
dannygalic
