Continuing in this 4 or 5 year tradition now, I am going to put out my list of top ten things I think or hope will happen in 2010. This is largely about tech, so I’m not going to predict whether or not we will find Osama bin laden (doubtful), or the economy will rebound (eh, we’ll see). So if you want to see my relatively good track record so far, just browse the predictions category.

1. Facebook hits 500M users by Q3 2010.
So this wouldn’t have been so tough had I just said in 2010, I added some difficulty to this bet to make it more challenging. Consider this: Facebook passed 350M users in Dec 09, and was at 175M in february 09. So they doubled in just under 10 months. My proposal is to grow by only 50% in the next 9 months. Though in my opinion this growth is going to be much tougher than the last 150M were. As the total numbers of likely users to pool from are limited. unless…

2. Facebook makes a huuuge mobile push
Using facebook really requires a computer of some significant sophistication. There are about a billion users out there who are not ready to access facebook on a daily basis via a pc, but they do have mobile phones. If they get this recipe right, they could explode in emerging markets. They already have many of the local languages down, so think facebook super lite. In existing markets I see them pushing more location awareness, and geo-location. they might do this via….

3. Facebook acquires Foursquare or Brightkite
Why not Gowalla? Well facebook LUVS ex-google engineering talent, so this makes sense to me. This will give them a team or two of sharp mobile savvy location savvy engineers. Brightkite might be the cheaper option right now from a PR perspective (less “hot”) but Foursquare might be cheaper from an investor standpoint (less $ has been poured in).

4. Hulu emphasizes the social layer to tv watching.
In Act 1 Hulu showed us that content is really key, and that they can make a fair amount from streaming videos to lots of eager people. In round 2 I see a big big big facebook connect integration effort to enable better conversations around the social objects that are tv shows and movies. They also start using this expanded user data to fine tune the ads we see coupled with better video discovery software (your friends liked Cheers, so you may like Frasier, etc.)

5. MySpace has a major overhaul
I think this is probably underway, but we have no idea how radical the overhaul is going to be. One rumor floated on techcrunch was they were going to adopt facebook connect, which would be a super freaking bold move by CEO Owen Van Natta (former FB guy). Lets say they do discard their own social graph data as its largely nonsense (like twitter’s graph data will also turn out to be). So if Myspace decides to leverage facebook’s graph, it is going to cannibalize some of its “value” initially and traffic/users (“why should i login to myspace if its just suggesting existing fb friends??”) so they are going to take a big gamble on being an “entertainment” destination. Hi5 is trying to do this right now w/casual games, not sure if its working. I see this one ending poorly. Traffic will be down substantially by year end, revenue per pageview will be up a ton, but not enough to offset the traffic crash.

6. Someone will finally make it easy for small businesses to get online
Its 2009 and it is still tough for mom&pop stores to get connected to the web. So I see someone building a single simple point and click platform all web based to setup a true end to end online presence. Joe Shmoe’s cafe will be able to get a domain, simple to update website (or blog or both), setup a facebook page, a twitter account, watch simple steps on how to manage them all (through this control panel), and possibly setup a basic e-commerce store. This business with the right partners (lots of portals could get revshare deals out of this), enough traffic fast, and good sales and especially support, could be a $250M business in under 18 months. Will take a lot of capital to get this going. – Turns out I made the same prediction last year, and no one has done it. This time I am expanding the prediction. -

7. Social gaming companies evolve out of facebook.com
Zynga, SGN, and playfish all grow their sites out of their games and take a big % of the top 50 US web properties. My guess, amongst the top FB game makers they can grab 10-15 of the top 50 slots this year, in 1 year. Zynga is pushing over 100M active users (not sure how many are duplicates) across its games inside of facebook, my guess is they can average 50M monthly active outside of FB by year end (using connect).

8. Electronic Arts “socializes” some of their top games
I think a version of the Sims for facebook would CRUSH IT. Totally kill it. They could get there fast by acquiring the guys from Outsmart Labs in New Zealand who built Small Worlds and building on their engine. If they are smart, they snag the engineering team up quick, and get it out there in 6 months.

9. Physical P2P credit card transactions/money transfers don’t take off
Square and others have a long way to go before making it mainstream. If they can pull off making deals with every street vendor in america, sure, then they will be widespread, but not mainstream. They are still a long way away from being some attachment everyone carries with them on a daily basis. At least 18 months before that happens. I see paypal acquiring them first.

10. Twitter undergoes a major re-org design wise.
With the addition of lists, and the emphasis coming on applications interfacing with twitter. Could we see them making themselves more like facebook? At least in terms of UI and the fact that we will need more fine tuned controls in twitter, it strikes me as something they have to be working on. The question then becomes do they want to be the destination for interfacing, or do they want to simply be the backbone for this communication.

So we have a few days left in 2009, but really, I doubt my results change much between now and then. So in may I published my predictions from January, they were 9 total.

So here are my predictions from last year and my “grade” for each.

1. People start building businesses.
So I posited that people would eschew crazy business plans and lean more towards the sensible cash-flow businesses. Not sure if this actually started happening or not. The economic turmoils of the world have put a damper on new hyped up companies, and the ones that did get hyped up really weren’t game changing from a business model perspective. We did see a shift to getting people to pay for things more, which I see as a positive thing.
Grade: N/A

2. Community APIs take another leap forward
Last year I posited FB connect, and others would get big adoptions. So I think I was dead on with this one. Though I’ve been espousing the use of community APIs for years. So I am gonna give myself an A- (friend connect and open social are both struggling IMO)

3. The portability of the social graph gets that much closer
So I posited that things like DiSo, APML, and FOAF would get big boosts. That didn’t happens so much, but the major networks did open a bit, and OpenID had a great year, so for this, I’m gonna give myself a B.

4. Small businesses come onto the web even more
If you count Twitter, then sure, tons of them signed up for twitter and facebook fan pages. Then promptly stopped updating them… I still think someone can come up w/a good solution. A-

5. Companies will adopt social media in new ways
I think this was proven as we saw more and more creative uses of facebook fan pages, applications, twitter contests, blog contests, etc. So even though this was an easy guess to make, I’m gonna give myself an A.

6. Mobile payment and micropayments will go mainstream this year
Oooh. So micropayments and mobile payments didn’t technically go mainstream yet. But we did see a large increase in small purchasing thanks to facebook and the social gaming arena. So this is a draw, since it took most of the year to prime the community for accepting micropayments. Grade C

7. Small is the new big
I posited that small projects would sprout up everywhere. I think thanks to twitter’s API (and the many copycat APIs today) that we do have tons of simple sites built around these things in short periods of time. So Grade A+

8. Twitter/micro-content hits mainstream.
Twitter is now being used in TV shows. ‘Nuff said. A+

9. Social networks will start talking to each other
Well lots of social networks are using facebook connect, and more and more are supporting data portability. So I’ll say A-. Would have been A+ if Hi5, orkut, or Myspace had adopted FB Connect.

Stay tuned, my 2010 predictions are already written and should go up next week.

[Note I wrote this in early January, and forgot to publish it]

This is the 4th year in a row I do this, and so far am a bit ahead on the predictions (each year slightly better than the previous, so pay attention this time), so I figure I might as well keep up the tradition.

Lets reflect on the past year so i can then jump to next year’s predictions.  So what has changed? The economy as a whole sucks, the capital markets suck, budgets are shrinking, and exits are vanishing.

So that was depressing, but what can we look forward to in 2009?

1. People start building businesses.
The idea of cash-flow positive businesses comes back into favor. People realize that it isn’t such a bad thing to build a web business that generates money and can support itself.  Realistically the exits we had grown infatuated with are now long gone, and not coming back for a while.  The ipo market is shot, and the traditional buyers (big web1.0 survivors) are scrambling to shore up their capital reserves.

2. Community APIs take another leap forward
Facebook connect, google friend connect, open social connect (purely theoretical), etc. all take major leaps in terms of adoption and functionality.

3. The portability of the social graph gets that much closer
Projects like DiSo and APML and FOAF take us one step closer, but really not until late in the year do we see much emerge from this (from an adoption/usability standpoint).

4. Small businesses come onto the web even more
There are MILLIONS of businesses out there that don’t have websites yet. This year whoever can build them cheap, cost effective, turn key systems for managing this will make a killing.  Synthasite is one to look at, but their offering won’t be able to convert mom & pop diner into mompopdiner.com yet.

5. Companies will adopt social media in new ways
Companies that were starting to adopt it in 2008 will start experimenting, and we’ll se a lot of brands connecting effectively with their fans.  My idea of carving a community out of an existing community will become more important.

6. Mobile payment and micropayments will go mainstream this year
The costs will have to come down for them to be realistically mainstream, but virtual goods will pave the way. Look to Visa to make an effort in this space to find new streams of revenue as consumer spending tightens a bit.

7. Small is the new big
Quick one weekend projects will emerge in force this year.  Open APIs and cheap infrastructure will make it super easy for someone to release a project every month. These projects won’t be huge money makers, but will grow like weeds. Twitter is going to benefit from this eco-system the most.

8. Twitter/micro-content hits mainstream.
When you start seeing main street people redoing their business cards to include their twitter and other micro content addresses, then you know its come of age. SXSW will give twitter a huge boost, again, but look to celebrities to push it from 4Million users to 20M users this year.

9. Social networks will start talking to each other
Look to see the 4-10th place networks to start sharing data and traffic between each other in an effort to compete with Facebook and Myspace (who will become the #2 this quarter).  Maybe we’ll see an adaptation to make Opensocial work with Facebook platform (Dan Lester was working on this a year ago via OpenSocket project).

Around this time last year I posted my predictions for 2007, and in the process tagged a few folks to do the same. This year after reviewing my predictions, I’ve decided to reformat the way my predictions for 2008 are proposed. On one hand I want them to be more accesible, I also want to be able to expand upon them a bit more. So without further ado, here is the basics of what I think is going to happen in 2008.

1. Measurement will explode. Analytics of sites, communities, behaviors, patterns, relationships, and activities will reach everyone and everywhere. The amount of data to be crunched and processed will be immense. The companies with the ability to relate the data and crunch it effectively and efficiently will be in a great position.
2. Social networks will continue to evolve. If you thought a lot of people’s attention was consumed by SocNets in 2007, you haven’t seen anything yet.
   1. Portability of your social graph and identity will emerge in LATE 08, not earlier. It won’t be driven by the major sites, but by the ecosystem (app developers, ad networks, etc.)
   2. OpenID in its current incarnation won’t be widely used. It WILL be widely supported though by the third quarter. Its still too geeky for average users.
   3. Ecosystem around Facebook will break $100 Million in revenue for the year. This is money the apps hooked into FB will generate.
   4. Ecosystem for apps hooked into MySpace will be big, but RPM on these pages will hover around 10% of facebook apps (data is poor, connections poor, and closeknit nature of the myspace graph will slow app growth here).
   5. OpenSocial Economy will be higher than myspace on a RPM, but significantly lower than Facebook. Reasons being: weaker connections (spam), inactivity rates of users, fewer US based customers.
   6. Combined the SocialApp Economy will push 200+Million. App installs will break a billion.
3. Social Networking Application Platforms will mature. As will the apps on them.
4. Communication streams will be evolving. Think of everyone having a personal activity RSS feed that everyone can integrate with. Activity feed and news feed for individuals = same thing.
5. Twitter will grow over a million active. The ecosystem here is what’s interesting. Twitter itself will provide white label tools for businesses, interesting marketing opportunities, and grow its revenue substantially. They will announce profitability at the END of 2008, when they are bought by Yahoo or Microsoft. AOL could be a sleeper pairing too.
   1. Twitter’s ecosystem will support a handful of companies financially. People who make smart moves out of the SMS tools and the social graph tools.
6. White label SocNet software will come out that supports FBML or OpenSocial out of the box. Think wordpress for social networks (Elgg is only one I know of). Maybe Ning will open source itself completely.
7. Social Ads will evolve. Beacon was scary at first, but once its opt-in, and sites all over can participate, they will explode. Beacon like services will also be all over the place. Lookery is a great example. Scott Rafer is a very clever guy, don’t know him personally, but he seems to be keen on putting the pieces of this social graph together. (Compete, MyBlogLog, Lookery) (Hey Scott, shoot me an email, we should talk ).
8. Google will buy about 8 or 9 companies. Microsoft 6. Yahoo 4. AOL 4. IAC 3.
   1. We will see some amazing stuff from these companies past purchases finally piecing together. One thing we’ll see is the emergence of Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL fighting like crazy to dominate behavioral targeting of advertising. Combined the three amigos there have activity profiles on hundreds of millions of people. Look to Fox to try and partner with one of them to monetize MySpace/foxbusines/foxsports/etc. better.
9. The way we look at interactions on the web will change. Networking will also change (keep an eye on LinkedIn, I see them evolving their business model to provide more services and value with their data, they have the worlds best resume/work history data of anyone). APML is worth watching too.
10. I expect to see a new term emerge for what would be Web 3.0. If web 1.0 was the connections between documents (hyperlinks), web2.0 the facilitation of users creating those documents, then web 3.0 will be the connections between people. SocialWeb sounds simple and decent for this evolutionary phase.

What do you think?

To follow up my post from December of 2006, here are the results:

“Social media” will evolve. Much the same way we have thousands of pro bloggers worldwide, we will have lots of people earning their living from social media. New ways of earning income will abound, look for the first paid plugs in a videocast, or more importantly, the first paid PRODUCT placement. Think Lonelygirl15 starts drinking lots of diet coke for a reason?

This was sort of right. Lots of growth in social media professionals. More bloggers living on the web, and video content. I also think we saw a growth in paid placement, although not overt, and I can’t back that up with figures

Social marketing will explode. The number of videos online will triple, but the number of ads attached to those videos will rise by 10x. Who this is good for: interactive agencies, media planners, video production companies, CDNs, video sites, YOU.

Well this has been a good year for companies like videoegg, youtube, revver, blip, etc. but my social marketing term should have been redefined. Social ads….

Podcasting will change. Gone will be the 30 minute long weekly shows in favor of 5-10 minute segments which can be better monetized, and better distributed. People have ADD as a collective whole, and don’t want to listen to poorly edited talk radio.

I think shorter content has grown, but really, podcasting has lost a lot of its hype, and is much the reason for us never releasing castvertising.com despite it being finished for 6 months.

Online advertising will grow more than experts think. Google will post huge gains, but the efficiencies brought to light by Yahoo’s Panama search marketing platform, and MSN adcenter, and I’m guessing AOL will have something neat too, will all change the ways that people buy ads. I’m betting ebay will partner with yahoo or aol on a method to track CPA ads better (yahoo/aol sell the ads, track the ads, and then people buy through paypal, and use skype to speak to the merchant).

If you count all the aquisitions, then this was an amazing year onthis front. Behavioral targeting was a huge buying zone in 07, and we’ll see the fruits of this frenzy in 08.

Widgets, widgets, widgets. 2007 is going to see a number of new delivery methods for widgets, more useful widgets will emerge. We’re already seeing the emergence of video chat and regular chat widgets making any site a lounge of sorts. My guess: widgets will further decentralize the web. We’ll also see a growth in widgets on blogs, and social sites. We might want to look for a social widget that ties into a user’s browser, so they can tell people where they are hanging out on the web, or tie together their countless social networking accounts.

Oh man. if you count the facebook platform as a widget platform, then I knocked this one out of the park. this is only going to get bigger in 2008.

Social Networking will change. I think we’re going to see the vertical encompass everything social networks morph to more topic oriented sites. People like to socialize with other like minded individuals. Whomever can capitalize on this, and tie together a few smart hubs will make some decent money. Remember its easier to market to niches than to everyone at once.

Ning hosting over 100,000 networks is proof of this. Emergence of niche network sites that are platform independent of sites like ning have been positive as well.

Smart startups will embrace SEO, PPC, SMO, SMM and the other marketing venues. As people start their search more and more on search engines and information hubs (or portals), people will need you to prepare yourself to be found by them. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope people stumble upon your site.

I think I was super right in this one. case in point two local startups here in Miami doing really smart things on the SEO side: Condo.com and Healthcare.com. They are positioning themselves to own their categories/verticals, and one big key is their smart search positioning.

More events outside of the valley will emerge. Wouldn’t you rather go to Miami in the winter?
Well the future of web design in new york, web connections north in vancouver, webmaster jam in dallas, blog conferences in orlando, chicago, and other cities all indicate growth is going on in other places outside the valley. Even more events will popup outside the valley in 2008.

Web+ will be the evolution of web2.0
This was basically me scratching my own back…

I posted my y2k7 predictions over at web+

Read them over here

So in the spirit of making yearly predictions right before the upcoming new year, I’ll make mine.

1. “Social media” will evolve. Much the same way we have thousands of pro bloggers worldwide, we will have lots of people earning their living from social media. New ways of earning income will abound, look for the first paid plugs in a videocast, or more importantly, the first paid PRODUCT placement. Think Lonelygirl15 starts drinking lots of diet coke for a reason?
2. Social marketing will explode. The number of videos online will triple, but the number of ads attached to those videos will rise by 10x. Who this is good for: interactive agencies, media planners, video production companies, CDNs, video sites, YOU.
3. Podcasting will change. Gone will be the 30 minute long weekly shows in favor of 5-10 minute segments which can be better monetized, and better distributed. People have ADD as a collective whole, and don’t want to listen to poorly edited talk radio.
4. Online advertising will grow more than experts think. Google will post huge gains, but the efficiencies brought to light by Yahoo’s Panama search marketing platform, and MSN adcenter, and I’m guessing AOL will have something neat too, will all change the ways that people buy ads. I’m betting ebay will partner with yahoo or aol on a method to track CPA ads better (yahoo/aol sell the ads, track the ads, and then people buy through paypal, and use skype to speak to the merchant).
5. Widgets, widgets, widgets. 2007 is going to see a number of new delivery methods for widgets, more useful widgets will emerge. We’re already seeing the emergence of video chat and regular chat widgets making any site a lounge of sorts. My guess: widgets will further decentralize the web. We’ll also see a growth in widgets on blogs, and social sites. We might want to look for a social widget that ties into a user’s browser, so they can tell people where they are hanging out on the web, or tie together their countless social networking accounts.
6. Social Networking will change. I think we’re going to see the vertical encompass everything social networks morph to more topic oriented sites. People like to socialize with other like minded individuals. Whomever can capitalize on this, and tie together a few smart hubs will make some decent money. Remember its easier to market to niches than to everyone at once.
7. Smart startups will embrace SEO, PPC, SMO, SMM and the other marketing venues. As people start their search more and more on search engines and information hubs (or portals), people will need you to prepare yourself to be found by them. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope people stumble upon your site.
8. More events outside of the valley will emerge. Wouldn’t you rather go to Miami in the winter?
9. Web+ will be the evolution of web2.0

So, what are your predictions for 2007? I’m tagging Alex, Carlos, Chris, and Xavier.

aka, everyone else is doing it, so I might as well too.

2005 was a very interesting year in terms of new companies hitting the street, new ideas popping up, and new technologies hitting or approaching critical mass. 2006 should be much of the same, but with some new twists. So here is my semi-organized list in response to all the others, for all of you to enjoy:

1. Audio will take off. No, not just ipod and mp3 sales, but everything related to them. Since almost everyone has an mp3 player of some sort (if they don’t they can get them practically free [heck, my bank gives them away for opening new accounts]). Since everyone will have audio players they will be looking to fill them up even more. So podcasting will REALLY take off.1B. Podcasting: Podcasting will hit mainstream as people associate it more with free content they can get via iTunes and yahoo and maybe AOL (this is another potential buying spree waiting to happen, don’t forget they own winamp). Podcasting numbers will go through the roof, especially when record labels start making deals with podcast networks to license their music as a clip of some kind. This will allow for a wider variety of content and more radio-like radio shows.
   With this new dearth of programming though, someone will have to pay for it….
2. Video will START to get big. In 2005 video sharing started to get a lot of players, but still hasn’t hit mainstream. The reason: decent video cameras are still expensive. Now that more digital cameras are getting quick video clip capabilities, then we will see more and more people turning to “flickr-like” services to share these funny little clips. However don’t expect to see a flood of amateur video that has been edited and cleaned up (remember iMovie is still Mac only, for now.)
3. Blog revenues will not be purely text ads. Bloggers will learn that a good revenue stream is not limited to a sole revenue stream. Also with click fraud skyrocketing, smart bloggers will hedge their bets on other sources, expect more people to build mini-stores using affiliate programs and other contextually relative forms of revenue. Bloggers will also start new parts of their website that bring in more people related to what they are covering (something that they should’ve been doing for ages).3B. ProBlogging will catch on even more. Darren Rowse and company will create their own mini-conference, charging $1000 a day, and keeping o’reilly and the other major companies out of the revenue stream.
4. VOIP will gain even more ground, phone numbers using voip service of some kind will grow by 50%, but revenues will only grow by 10-15%. The real winners will be those companies that make voip seamless, and show people how to hook up their entire house telephone system to their new voip box.
5. The spread of mashups for no particular financial reason will slow. However, people will start mashing up other applications into their own (i.e. google/yahoo maps will become expected in an interface).5B. Google and yahoo will start making some serious dough off of these mashups-in-an-app setups. They will also make it practically drag and drop easy to add their services.
6. Weblogs, Inc. will put out a magazine for engadget, basically a 2 week digest of their posts. It will be published by Time Warner.
7. Podcasts will take off (I am repeating this because it will have a second wave in the 3Q).