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Predicting the Fire Hose? A Sampling of Predictions
2/20/2008
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a venerable organization, published a book on the 50th anniversary of computing in 1996 called Special ACM 50th-Anniversary Issue: Strategic Directions in Computing Research, by Wegner and Doyle. The authors, in looking back over those fifty years, saw that many of the predictions about technology -- with notable, laughable exceptions -- were at least in the ballpark. But predictions about how humans would use the technology were almost always wrong.Therefore, it's interesting that even though Web 2.0 is often called the social Web, emphasizing human use of technology, we get more predictions than ever. Technology might have been predictable when computing was "big iron," but what about the chimerical social web? Still, it's the tech award and prediction season, so let's check out what's going on.
Checking in with the 2008 Horizon Report, we find categories of technology that the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE-sponsored report thinks are "on the horizon" for higher education this coming year. We find:
- Grassroots video
- Collaboration webs
- Mobile broadband
- Data mashups
- Collective intelligence
- Social operating systems
Note that 5 of these 6 work in Web 2.0 space. Grassroots video is content creation, collaboration webs refers to where you share the video, mobile broadband is how others get access to the video, data mashups allows your video to become part of a larger "show," collective intelligence may then popularize that mashup, and social operating systems (if we ever get one) could get your mashup into applications organized within the Web desktop.
And, now, for the Crunchies, awards for best tech innovations in a number of categories announced in the middle of January 2008 (www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf). These are the Web 2.0 winners:
- Earthmine
- Digg
- Netvibes
- Meebo
- iMedix
- Techmeme
- Automattic
- StumbleUpon
The list above is about half of the total list and comes mostly from the data mashup and collective intelligence categories.
But, if you check the predictions at the ReadWriteWeb site (www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2008_web_predictions.php) we are forewarned that some or many of these sites and others will be purchased this year.
So, we know that Web 2.0 will continue as a major growth industry for the next few years, and that right now many sites are apparently being created with the idea of being purchased in a couple of years. And notably, these sites are eagerly exploiting the wonders of AJAX.
The ReadWriteWeb also suggests what will grow from the collective intelligence thrust, such as:
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