Predictions, predictions…

We’re hours away from 2007 and nary a list of predictions has cropped up here on Profy. What gives? Maybe our dubious overlords (I’m not sure what the secrecy clause in the contract said about mentioning the gods of Web 2.0 openly. Oh well.) have instituted a crack down I never received notice of. Or, maybe, just maybe, we’re trying to cover our bases by preempting a year of “Ha-ha, you were wrong!” with silence. Whatever the case maybe, I figured it behooved me to stick my own fuel into the projection engine that gets started at the close of every year. Here goes nothin’.

Google will come out of beta, finally… at least a little… please?

Let us all lay a collective smack down on the ‘Big G’ if they fail to at least drop the ‘beta’ tag for big successes like Gmail and their highly acclaimed Calendar app. How about Docs & Spreadsheets too? I don’t know about you, but in the tradition of Wired Magazine’s ‘Wired, Tired, and Expired’ lists, I’m calling Google’s administration of ‘beta’ on many of its products - both popular and not so – very, very “tired”. Gmail will most definitely shine as an official 1.0-esque application this year. Hopefully the rest of their office suite follow suit.

YouTube will be followed by niche hits, thus Web 2.0 will continue to grow.

YouTube is a mess, but a fun one. It’s the only place you’ll find, well… what can’t you find on YouTube? Anyway. It’s great for those moments of procrastination we’ve grown all too fond of, courtesy of the miracles down ‘broadband alley’. Music videos. Cats chasing bears. Tricks, crashes, standup acts, bloopers, tearjerkers – I would go on, but the list would be furiously long, and then you wouldn’t give this article the five-star treatment. Which you’re welcome to do, by the way. Back to YouTube.

Like I said, it’s a great service. It’s disorder to the nth degree, but it’s as beautiful a disorder as you’re going to get. But there are still many roles to fill in the realm of Internet video. Take short films.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like a good movie (Shawshank Redemption - the best ever, thank you very much). And there are millions who don’t mind keeping their eyes glued to their Dells (I’m not playing favorites; My PowerBook’s my absolute best friend. Honest.) to watch Cars or whathaveyou, whether the feature is a download or on DVD. Or HD-DVD. Or Blu-Ray. But I’m a firm believer that if folks were shown a venue for short films, they’d eat them up like there was no tomorrow.

Everyone has their own tastes. I love novels, but I have a hard time liking any short stories. Interestingly enough, the same doesn’t go for moving pictures. I like fantasy shorts as much as the LOTR (Lord of the Rings) trilogy. I’m still waiting for a service to cater to my likes – with DVD-or-better quality to boot – and the likes of millions of other comedy, noir, and phantasmagorical fans out there. iTunes provides some, but not nearly enough to do justice to the genre. I predict this niche need, along with many others, will be fulfilled in the 12 months ahead. And yes, I’m crossing my fingers. You should do the same.

Web 2.0 will grow, but it probably won’t expand

2006 saw a lot of experimentation. Consumers were trying to find their places among the wealth of choices presented by the world of Web 2.0, and developers were trying to get funded, stay employed – basically just trying to make a hit wherever they could. There were winners and losers (we all know who they are, so I won’t bore you with yet another rundown), and while this frenzy will undoubtedly carry over somewhat into the new year, we’ll be seeing quite a bit of consolidation, perhaps even a thinning of “the herd”.

Yes, this means that some YouTube clones will see their days numbered, but overall, that’s a good thing. Hopefully, we’ll forgo a bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble, but with VC and “angel” funding reaching pre ’99 proportions, the billion-dollar buyouts won’t always be sure bets.

In all, however, Chris Anderson is right. The ‘long tail’ is getting far more attention now than in the decade prior, and it’s clearly showing to be a stronger keeper of the virtual equilibrium than anything we’ve seen in the past. Still, like v1.0, Web 2.0 needs a good trimming to keep at least one of its feet in reality. Hopefully the investment houses won’t get ahead of themselves in 2007 and crash a party that’s nowhere close to being over.

As far as breakthroughs are concerned, most have already been made. There’ll definitely be some smallish highlights throughout the coming months, but the foundation for the Internet’s next stage has been laid, and some honest effort in making the best of the existing services better, making more standards more openly accessible, will be key to a successful year. Here’s a philosophical fragment to chew on: I hope to see more iPod versus Zune, and less iPod or Zune.

I couldn’t fail to mention…

Open Source. I’m a sucker for it, so I wouldn’t make all of the above assertions without giving the stuff borne out of the GPL and stamped with CC (Creative Commons) a holler. Linux isn’t a product of Web 2.0, but the fundamentals that have kept it so open and so free have trickled into the “web app” world, so I’ll just say that without open source, the tidal shifts and massive progress in the short moment between 2000 and 2006 would not have happened on such a scale. If you consider all factors, obvious and hidden, that have led us to today, I think you’ll probably agree.

Cheers to open source. Cheers to Web 2.0. Cheers to a productive, rewarding, and astonishing 2007.