My predictions for the forthcoming year:
- Location, location, location: We will see much greater use of location-based services. Why? Google Maps mashups are becoming more ubiquitous, due to the ease of use, and consumers are buying hardware which can exploit such information, such as GPS devices, mobile phones with GPS (or alternative) support for locations, etc. We are seeing a number of small-scale experiments (I have been geo-locating my events this year, and Northumbria University has recently announced a UK University locator service). This year we’ll see such experiments moving to services.
- Web 2 services come and go, but become ubiquitous: there will be some great new Web 2.0 services – and we’ll start to make use of ones which the early adopters are already using (PageFlakes, anyone?). But others will fail to avoid the ‘chasm’ in the Gartner hype curve for new technologies. However we will develop better models for evaluating and deploying Web 2.0 services, and the sustainable services will become widely deployed. And the endless debates about the ‘Web 2.0’ term will diminish.
- W3C wars will continue: We’ll hear more about the battles within W3C in areas such as XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5, Web Services, the Semantic Web and WCAG 2.0. Stripping away the technical debate, we’ll realise that the arguments are between the idealists (“we’ll throw away HTML and start again and get it right”) and the pragmatists (“HTML won’t go away; we need to improve it incrementally”).
- We’ll discover that we are a Community of Practice: The term “community of practice” will become more widely used and after an initial period of unease with this phrase (similar to last year’s criticisms of ‘Web 2.0’) the UK Web development community, especially those who attend the Institutional Web Management Workshops or engage in debate on the mailing lists) will realise that it has been a community of practice for several years and will exploit a wider range of social networking tools to build on the strengths of the community.
- Use of existing services vs developing new services: There will be a split in the development community between those who feel there’s a need to develop new tools and services and those who argue that it is better to make use of existing tools and services. It may take some time before a hybrid approach is developed.
- We become more flexible about IPR: We’ll discover that copyright holders start to realise that user-generated content which makes use of copyrighted materials can actually be beneficial to the copyright holder (by exposing their materials to new audiences and by providing new business models, for example). We will start to deploy less rigid policies – and discover that this makes it easier to get services off the ground and attract audiences – with Creative Commons licences providing a valuable starting point.
- Management of user IDs for Web 2.0 services will be a major challenge: As staff and students leave their institutions they will realise that many of the Web 2.0 services for which an email address provides the authentication, cannot be managed after the institutional email address is withdrawn. This will be recognised as a major challenge which will need to be addressed.
Any comments on these predictions?
1. have you seen “Operator” http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator/ ? this is finally something that makes the whole microformats thing “click” for a lot of people (including myself), as it does exactly what i believe to be essential: including useful things that can be done with microformats directly (natively) in the browser. the browser becomes more of an information broker than a pure content reader. and of course, pimping my own wares, the geourl extension http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/71/ and dublin core viewer http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/73/ are worth a look.
2. (and 7.) on a tangent, the more “web 2.0” services people use, the more they’re likely to feel like they’re struggling to keep on top of all their “pieces of themselves” scattered online. see jeremy keith’s “adactio elsewhere” http://elsewhere.adactio.com/
4. the description of CoP on wikipedia there made me realise that this is exactly how i’ve been feeling about my engagement in the accessibility community at large over the last few years. definitely like the term.
5. a possible extension or third category: developers extending existing services to add specific additional functionality on top, and/or mash-ups/aggregations of two or more services to create something more than the sum of its parts; both of these facilitated by open/documented APIs and permissive terms and conditions of these services.
7. http://openid.net/ is looking quite interesting at this early stage. simon willison’s screencast http://simonwillison.net/2006/openid-screencast/ is a good introduction. even thomas vander wal (he of the personal infocloud) http://www.vanderwal.net/ seems to think it’s got legs. a possible adjunct trend here: more and more, it may become standard for most students to actually have their own email address/domain already when entering into education…possible challenge here may be reversed: allowing aggregation and access to institutional email on and off campus as seamless, integrated part of students’ existing information management habits (on a simple level, allowing POP3/IMAP access to uni email rather than forcing a particular geographically bound or web based email client on them).
I think this view is a bit utopian, or was that the intention? I’d add:
– More and more companies (or their investors) will need to start to turn a profit for continued existence, so previously free services will start to impose charges. This could be a good thing if it finally starts a universal micropayment scheme.
– There will be a “retro” techno luddite backlash against technology in favour of “real education”: printed books, f2f lectures in place of podcasts, etc.
Hi AJ
My predictions aren’t intended to be utopian – it’s what I think will happen (and I’ll review the predications next year).
I agree with you that companies will need to review their business processes. However this does not necessarily need to be based on subscription services – there can be other ways of raising money (e.g. advertising; subscription services for advanced features; etc.)
I’d agree that there could be a backlash against technologies – but I don’t expect that to happen next year. But there is a need for continency plans in case this happens.
Brian
Hi Patrick
Thanks for your comments. Some responses:
1. FireFox plugins for location metadata: I’ve been using the Greasemap script. I’ve installed yours – looks good. I’ve also been using Operator.
2. Yes, we need a simple mechanisms for pulling together data which may be scattred across a range of Web 2.0 services. I’ve been experimenting with aggregators such as Netvibes and PageFlakes. These may be OK for motivated enthusiasts, but there’s a need to be able to do this at an organisational level. Whether this will mean that the community will go for the large monolithic solution remains to be seem.
7. Thanks for this info – this is new to me.
Happy new year.
Brian
Dear Brian,
Thanks for this post : esp.point 1 : sure you are right about this. The UK Universities mashup in particular is very interesting and useful.
I also like your point 6 : what you say makes sense in the Do-It-Yourself Web 2.0 environment. The Creative Commons licence does indeed point the way.