This year 2006 will have been rich in twists and turns and (not really) big surprises. It seems that the machine is restarted, and the year 2007 promises to be even more intense. Here are my predictions for 2007 (.0):
The appearance of a decentralized virtual universe.
If Second Life strongly resembles the realization of a dream of an author of Science Fiction, the service suffers from its too strong centralization. The ultimate virtual universe will be like the Internet and Jabber: a set of interconnected nodes using a free and standardized communication protocol.
The decline and then stabilization of the number of blogs.
With the attraction of novelty gone, the number of blogs opened will certainly slow down, especially among young people, even if the phenomenon will still experience a certain growth in countries where they make it possible to thwart pervasive censorship. Blogs with quality content will remain and gain visibility as the older age groups take ownership of the medium.
The use of RSS will eventually become widespread, allowing true reading on demand. Our way of approaching information has radically changed over the last 5 years: we read more, better, and in a less dispersed way.
A beginning of congestion of Internet infrastructures.
The explosion of services with high demand for bandwidth, and particularly those based on the massive distribution of videos, risks congesting networks that were not designed for such a speed. The transition in 4 years from domestic lines at 512Kb to lines at 20Mb will pose a real problem, and risk putting a number of access providers on the straw.
The emergence of SSE- based applications
SSE stands for Simple Sharing Extension. It is an extension allowing two-way communication on an RSS feed. The possibilities of such a format are more than interesting, and I am a little surprised to have never come across a single application using it.
Transformation of online advertising services
Panama, the new advertising platform for Yahoo! is likely to relaunch the war of online advertising. The agencies exploiting “new media” resulting from “web 2.0” such as the distribution of online videos and RSS feeds are still rare and should be called upon to develop in the coming year. This should allow platforms like Youtube or Dailymotion to increase their sources of income, and possibly to compensate their contributors through this.
That’s all folks as they say at the end of some cartoons. Have a happy holiday, and see you in a year to see what it is.