Alright, so Pete over at Mashable tagged me (I’m it!) to post some thoughts on what’s upcoming for 2007. I have tried to provide some different thoughts/ideas than Pete has already posted. First, I am honored to be one of the people that Pete tagged. I appreciate it and really have enjoyed the last few months more than I ever expected. And I, for one, am really looking forward to 2007. My thoughts here are general technology thoughts for 2007 and are not listed in any specific order. I think #5 might be the one to watch. Pete suggests tagging your pages with “mypredictions2007” to be watched across the blogosphere.

1. Web 2.0 will die

Ok, now before you click the X to close this site, let me explain. At some point, Web 2.0 ideas and thoughts will become the norm and we will no longer need to call sites and trends Web 2.0. And one day after that point (I am guessing mid-July), someone will begin the next “hot” term. And no, it won’t be Web 3.0 even though the NY Times believes it is.

2. YouTube will become a hated property

That’s right, you heard it here first. A site will be started called boycottyoutube.com to talk about how “You” created the content which allowed a few people to become ultra-rich and then the site immediately became a commercialized site. Mark Cuban has a good piece about this. Pete wrote a piece about Chevy as a new sponsor on YouTube.

3. There will be expansion and contraction in the Web space

I think we will see a heavy contraction in the Internet next year. Acquisitions and mergers will be sky-high as the number of good quality is too high. At the same time, those founders of those sites that are acquired begin new sites. Thereby expanding the market again.

4. The 2008 U.S. Presidential campaigns will be broadcast

We are already seeing this with Scoble and RocketBoom working with John Edwards. Wasn’t Edwards a VP candidate in 2004? I think the candidates will use blogs, video and sites like YouTube to promote themselves over and over. And over. We will be bombarded with messaging in the second half of 2007 from the candidates and then we will see 2x more media from individuals who want to see their candidate win.

5. U.S. Presidential candidates will use Payperpost to win election

6. A new analytics and reporting core set of metrics will be agreed to

I can hope can’t I? Interaction Metrics will be the way of the future. Let the Page View die already. It did us well. I still would love to get a team together to create the next evolution of metrics. And yes, if we use them, the agencies will too. But if we are afraid, we will still be same-ole-same-ole in 2008.

7. Microsoft and Yahoo! will partner to beat Google

Yahoo! has the net… Microsoft has the apps… Yahoosoft will be able to compete (and win) with (against) Google.

8. Yahoo! will buy AOL

Just makes sense. I still have my first AOL email address from 1993.

9. Online time per user will drop by 10%

People will want to actually meet IRL with friends not just text, sms, aim, skype, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc. with each other. Sites like Meetup.com and Upcoming.org will grow exponentially.

10. Pricing for mobile devices will become manageable

In the U.S., data prices on mobile phones is still astronomical. In most of the world, prices for calls are high. I see a leveling as new players creatively disrupt the marketplace.

11. People will require payment for content

I am still always a bit taken when people are so willing to provide content to sites for free. Sure you get the hosting and so forth but I think there will be a collective response at some point in 2007 that individuals want some form of compensation for their hard work.

12. Large corporations will start to see true benefits to using the Web effectively

No, not just a fancy Flash home page. But using IM to communicate. Creating Wikis for employees to share information on how to solve problems. Allowing employees to be flexible in their schedules and projects so that they can build more productive tools.

13. Professionals will see the benefit of blogging

Lawyers, doctors, accountants, individual practitioners will see the benefits of blogging – the biggest benefit being that they can get closer to the customer and perhaps win over larger corporations.

14. The beginnings of full tv online

The ability to order TV channels from anywhere on an ala-carte manner. Order whatever you like, pay per channel and watch what you want. The major broadcasting stations will realize they need to do this to survive. Pay extra for no ads.

15. Misc

ABC News will fire Amanda Congdon – she will do a trip across America back to CT. Loren Feldman will replace her on ABC News but will be required to wear a tight tshirt.

Lastly, here are my tags – you are it!

• Stephanie Quilao
• Loren Feldman
• Jeremiah Owyang
• Hiten Shah
• Neil Patel

Time Magazine has listed the "50 Coolest Websites" for 2006. I find it interesting that with all of the "cool" sites, they had to list their own TMZ site as a coolest Time Waster. Here are some that I think were left out:

Time Wasters: 

The biggest omission I see is StumbleUpon. This is clearly the best/coolest Time Waster around because not only is the tool cool, but the sites you learn about are cool.

Travel & Real Estate:

Where is TravelZoo? The absolute coolest site as it saves you money. And that's cool.

News & Information:

Digg? C'mon people. Digg does not have content. Would have been nice to see some good blogs here.

Staying Connected:

Where is Zoho? If you are going to put Google Spreadsheets down (even though now its Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho should be there too.

Oh well, they did a pretty good job overall, I give them a B-, and as they say, there is always next year.

Every so often, someone high up at Google remarks about how large their index has grown.  From a tiny 2 billion to a nice 6 billion, from 6 billion to 10 billion, and from 10 billion to who knows what.  There are even predictions that the Web is set to dramatically increase as social networks and blogs continue to power growth.

Given the billions and billions of pages out there, it's not surprising that this past year has seen a number of link aggregation services crop up.  First of course, there are the "link lists" as I'd like to call them.  Old standbys, like
Slashdot and Metafilter have been around for years, but it was their more innovative brethren, like Digg and

Reddit, that truly made this genre explode (yes, I know Reddit is currently
significantly smaller than Slashdot, but from what I can tell it's trajectory is pointed upward).  Then we have the meta-aggregators, like Original Signal and
Popurls, that take RSS feeds from both blog posts and the aforementioned link lists and make their own blocks of links.  These are also helpful – for those of us that have yet to go crazy with RSS readers (such as myself), these provide a nice pre-packaged in-between.

Now, as I said, the proliferation of billions upon billions of pages necessitates that we use services such as these, services that take all all the crud out there, strips the wheat from the chaff, and then serves it to us in meaningful, digestible ways.  But that's when we arrive at what I call, “The Perfect Pleasure of Link Aggregation“.

I take the term "the Perfect Pleasure" from Oscar Wilde, found in the Picture of Dorian Gray:

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a
perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied."
- Lord Henry

Link aggregation services are exactly like that: they give us all the great news on the Web, but running through all the new links a service has to offer can take as little as 30 minutes.  For the avid Internet junkie, 30 minutes is but a sliver of the time we spend online in any given day.  By serving all of the best new links on a silver platter, link aggregators allow us to gorge on news indiscriminately, and by the end of our experiences we are left, as was Lord Henry with his cigarette, unsatisfied.

There could be two issues here: either our link aggregation services aren't scouring enough of the Web to keep us completely satisfied (something, given Digg's breadth and popularity, I find decreasingly likely), or there just isn't enough on the Web out there that's really that interesting (maybe 2 billion of those 6 billion pages is full of stuff like
this…).

So really, either there needs to be a better, faster Digg, or the Internet needs to become more interesting and much larger much faster much sooner.  Right?

Of course, I left out a third option – maybe I spend too much time online.  That, my friends would tell me, is what the problem is.  So if you, like me, find all of these services increasingly frustrating, perhaps it's worth wondering whether you should just get off the computer once in a while.  As for me, I'll just keep on complaining.

Darshan is a Web developer and co-founder of ImagineEasy Solutions, LLC, an educational software firm.

I am introducing a new feature on CenterNetworks and it is called the "WTF Dept.". Stories here will be things that just make you say WTF. :)

First up is FindTheMagicBox. Following right behind the MillionDollarHomePage and now the Pixelotto sites, FindTheMagicBox hopes to sell $5 million in pixels and then give away $1 million. The site also hopes that by clicking around to find the winning box for the day, that users will visit multiple advertiser sites and purchase from or learn more about that advertiser. From my former life, I am pretty sure that there needs to be a complete set of official rules listed, but I do not see any.

Natali over at TechCrunch had a post on Dec. 1 about the launch of Pixelotto which had a great discussion with over 170 comments!

Assuming that everyone has paid for their pixels on FindTheMagicBox, then Allen (great name btw!) has sold over $125k so far. And that is plain awesome and I bow before his greatness. I must admit that with all of these sites doing so well, I am a bit jealous.

Allen Wilson, founder, states:

“The first person to find the Magic Box wins the $500 daily prize and is entered into a drawing for the annual Grand Prize of $1 million, to be announced once 25% of the pixels at FindTheMagicBox.com are sold. As more people click on the images to try to find the Magic Box, businesses increase their visibility, drive traffic and hopefully boost sales”. “The Million Dollar Home Page was highly successful at this. Those who placed images with links to their Web sites realized a dramatic increase in traffic. One company claimed its Web hits went from an average of 90 to over 5,000 per day. And more important, some businesses claimed revenue doubled in just a weekend. We anticipate similar results for our advertisers throughout the year.”

I wish Allen success in his journey.

So this morning I get a note that BabyTV has launched. And immediately I start thinking about when I was a baby what did I play with. My Fisher-Price cash register and shopping cart were my faves.

BabyTV is, "the Internet's first integrated television-style broadcast channel and social networking community focused on the needs of new and expectant parents." The site has a large number of videos and content. Clearly the video format works well here. Instead of reading the proper way to change a diaper, watch a video. Instead of reading an article about how to check a baby’s temperature, watch a video. This site feels much more like a tv channel than a YouTube style site. Which might be a good thing.

John Textor, Chairman and CEO of BabyUniverse said,

“We have long communicated our belief that every e- commerce company of today is a new media company of tomorrow and BabyTV.com now stands as a pioneering application within the Internet-Television revolution. While the primary goal of BabyTV.com, and our other content sites PoshCravings.com and ePregnancy, is to increase revenues from advertisers, we also intend BabyTV.com to build for our e-commerce sites the kind of loyalty with consumers that can be difficult to achieve in a pure e- commerce environment. If content breeds loyalty, and loyalty reduces dependency on Internet marketing expense, then we expect BabyTV.com to become a valuable driver of the BabyUniverse business strategy.”

Right off the bat, I see three major issues:

• Everywhere they say "BabyTV.com" – yet without the www, the site does not resolve!!?!?!
• There is no STOP button on the video player – GRR! Zero for usability
• WHY is there a web browser inside this site? I don’t get it at all. I mean I get the sense they want you to stay watching the videos while you surf other sites, but by placing the other sites inside a frame, you are way too limited.

In addition, the site uses an interesting layout in that it is using a frameset but it appears to work well. However, as well all know the biggest limitation of a frameset is not being able to favorite/bookmark a page, only the home page. Since this site is targeted towards the mainstream, I think this was a HUGE mistake in the choice of coding. Here is what the site looks like on my laptop:

I must have missed as I thought typically there are 2 parents of a baby, but the site creator in her opening video states that the site is for moms. While I understand the mom/female/mother element from marketing goods to women for 10 years online, leaving out the men in the opening video is just silly.

Final comments

Overall, the site has a ton of good content for parents and expectant parents. I think the technical issues might hold the site back from reaching its maximum potential.

This Christmas, one of the gifts that I received was the book “The Audacity of Hope,” by Barack Obama. While I hesitate to sound like every other Obama convert, I have to admit he writes well and presents some compelling (if not altogether novel) ideas. I must also admit that I am predisposed to being an Obama cheerleader, since I am from Chicago, am a Democrat, and realize that, despite my admiration and support of Hillary, and despite her wealth, name recognition, and centrist politics, it’s improbable she’ll make the trip all the way to the White House. If she does, that’s great and the country will be better for it, but if in fact my gut is right, Obama might be our best hope.

Now, as an aside, the fact that the best we Democrats can do after eight years of Republican skull-fuckery is pick an inexperienced jr. senator whose name sounds like the bastard offspring of Iraq’s former leader and Al-Qaeda’s current one, well, that’s a bit sad. But as I said, that’s an aside.

What I really want to talk about is one of the key messages in the first part of his book. It has to do with how people look at politicians and think that Washington makes them calculating, cynical, and captured by special interests. He makes a good argument as to why politicians are perceived as such. Grossly oversimplified, it’s something like the following: the media provides the biggest exposure of a candidate to his constituents, and therefore, not only does a candidate have to watch the words he says, but his opponents are also encouraged to run negative campaign ads that dig deep into his electoral voting record to pull out the small print that makes him look bad. I see his point; every major bill has a hundred different amendments, and it’s certain that some of those amendments are good ones and some are bad ones. A politician who has been in Washington for a while realizes this, and the less idealistic ones decide that the best way to win is to be calculating to mitigate sensational media exposure, cynical with the types of legislation they pursue, and captured by interest groups, since satisfying them promises their future support. So maybe it’s not just a perception people have – maybe it’s true, but also, maybe it’s natural and inevitable.

Of course, Obama claims to be of a different grain. I think over time we’ll see whether this is true – as I said I like him, so I’ll trust him for now.

Now, let’s look at the question of political transparency. Obama says that the media, the legislative process, and negative campaigning have a lot to do with the current state of affairs. That’s understandable. What I wonder is, in the same way C-SPAN was able to open up all the sessions of the House and Senate to video scrutiny, can Web 2.0 facilitate a more meaningful dialogue with a politician and his constituents?

Dean’s campaign in 2000 was the beginning of this trend, but since then the form has not advanced much. Blogs are still the only real “Web 2.0″ tool used in politics, and even they are strictly reserved as (in)formal mouthpieces for politicians. And in truth, campaign / politician blogs do nothing to solve the issues Obama highlights. (When I talk about blogs, I’m not referring to blogs like the Daily Kos or The Huffington Post- those are great blogs that have done loads to make media more transparent and politicians more accountable. I’m talking about the dumb blogs that candidates put up to talk about how nasty their opponent is or how positive their campaign group is being despite what the polls say. I’m talking about the blogs that have tons of !!’s in them.)

Here’s what I think could be great:

• Encourage candidates to publish their own voting records along with the bills that they refer to – that way, people can see and judge for themselves why a person voted the way they did. Tie in wiki and social annotation features, and then you can create a system where constituents can actively determine a candidate’s true position and share that information with others.
• Create a media play-by-play page where political staffers can take media articles and write notes in the margin that show what things mean.
• Make a list showing the promises a politician made as a candidate and how his electoral record compares to that (and where there are exceptions, politicians would be able to provide the necessary context as well). And again, throw up a comment board to get an idea of what people think.

I’m sure there are hundreds of other areas where the “interactive” processes of Web 2.0 can make a difference. Any thoughts? Post your comments below. Maybe at some point, someone clever will design a nice, lightweight template that candidates can use to actually implement these ideas. =)

Darshan is a Web developer and co-founder of ImagineEasy Solutions, LLC, an educational software firm.

I love forums and have decided to add one to CenterNetworks. Check out the forums and post away. I want to make sure that CenterNetworks communications go in-out, out-in, side-to-side, top-bottom and any other way possible. Let's get talking!

CenterNetworks forums »

You can also check out the inagural post.