2008 Predictions

David just signed off for the year and I still have to get my foundation-less predictions for 2008 out.  Wait! Wait!

2007 was definitely the breakout year for social networks.  But don't think that 2008 will just be a replay.  There's some significant new trends in motion.

Here's what I think we'll see next year:

• Consolidation of Online Activities:  More ways to take unified actions across all of your online presence points.  Apps that are now essentially toys, such as MoodBlast, will gain in depth and usefulness and allow you to simultaneously manage your various online profiles.
• Strategic Shift to Social Applications:  In 2008 the question will be "build a social network?  Why would you want to do that?"  It will be all about building applications that leverage existing social networks.
• Rise of Concurrent Programming:  As we move towards apps that are deployed in a fault-tolerent distributed manner across on-demand compute clouds, such as Amazon's EC2, we'll look towards platforms built from the ground up to support distributed, concurrent programming - such as Erlang.
• More Blending of Web and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs):  Its becoming more and more obvious that the arbitrary division between web development and application development is breaking down.  We're all just building applications that use the internet, with the front end technology being just an architecture decision.  New business that use a mix of RIA's and web clients will continue to appear in 2008.
• More WAX!:  Web Application eXchange!  With OpenID, OpenSocial, Facebook apps etc,  there are more and more examples of many web-based applications working together in order to form greater value.

There it is.  I'll look at this post again this time in 2008 and see how well I did.  Until then (unless David gets a last minute burst of inspiration) - see you in 2008!