JonesPC

JonesPC’s 2008 tech and web predictions

Happy New Years Eve!!!

Yea its that time again. Out with 2007, in with 2008. Last year has been a good year, lots of exciting news. But thats all over. Starting today I’m putting that all behind me and am looking forward to the new year. One thing everyone has are predictions of what they think will happen in the new year and I am not any different. I was just thinking about things and came up with a few predictions myself in the tech and internet world. Lets get started shall we?

• Digg will be bought!!!

This one if a very obvious and safe prediction, maybe because of a few rumors that came about in the last couple of months about companies courting ole Kevin Rose and the Digg company. I think this year we will see a lot of consolidation. Companies are getting really competitive and startups that are successful, like Digg will continue to get snatched up. It will happen in the second half of the year, and they will be bought by someone that no one is suspecting. If you have been paying attention to what has been going on, you’d notice that Kevin and company has been slowly building  Revision 3. It hasn’t been quiet, because everyone has been hearing about the Hirings (Louderback, Patrick Norton, and now Roger Chang) and the millions that they have been getting in VC money is for some plan. The focus on Revision 3 is preparation for the "Next thing" for Kevin after Digg is sold. That way he has a project to continue.

This is an additional prediction along with the main prediction. Revision 3 will play around or hint at the idea of becoming an actual cable or satellite television station toward the end of the year. In 2009, I might be predicting Revision 3 being bought by a larger TV network.

• Mahalo Who!?!

You heard about Mahalo right? Jason Calacanis’s new project, a search engine with handwritten results of sorts. Well I think it will never take off. It had a little buzz, then they hired the lovely Veronica Belmont to do a daily video show (which is very entertaining). But I have to say that the video show is probably the highlight of the whole Mahalo project. I think Mahalo as it is now, will pretty much disappear from our memories and quietly fade away. If it does still exist by the end of the year, there will be some major changes.

• Bloggers Beware.

Everybody blogs. Blogging for fun isn’t going anywhere, but people that are making money blogging are going to be shaken up a bit this year. The reason is - Advertisers, although they are spending more money, are going to start spending that advertising dollar a little smarter. Joe Smoe with 2 or 3 thousand viewers a day is going to start finding it harder to rake in the big bucks consistently and only the really big blogs will be making that loot. Another thing that is going to happen is what I talked about in the Digg prediction. Consolidation. Bloggers are going to start getting hired by blog networks. Blog networks are going to want to pool their resources to get even bigger money coming and they are going to figure it out (if they haven’t already done so) and band together. Of coarse the Shoemaker’s and John Chow’s are going to still be around. But they are going to be the main targets for advertisers, more so than before. Those A-listers are getting better at what they do and are becoming more desirable. A lot of smaller bloggers are going to slowly fade away, or get jobs working for bigger bloggers. What this also means is that if you are one of the smaller bloggers, and can hold out, you may end up being a little better off by the end of the year.

• Vista will be Vista

Yea on the Windows Vista front, nothing will change as far as the perception of Vista being a horrible OS. It will get better and more people will start to use it, but its fun to bash MS so it will still be looked at as a mess throughout the year. I do however think that Direct X 10 will see a major upgrade and everyone will have to buy new video cards to be compatible with a new working Direct X 10. Sometime around August or September, Microsoft will release a service pack 2 that will include the new revised Direct X 10 and make the OS what it should’ve been at launch. No one is going to care, they will just complain that they have to buy new video cards and that Microsoft is too little too late. Meanwhile, Vista will in more homes than ever.

• Google’s OpenSocial will flop

People are territorial, they like having their "stomping ground". I believe that most people would rather have their place on one social website where they can really build and rally around their online community, than they would like to have a universal social sea of unending social websites to get lost in. A lot of online communities have lost its luster and have been a haven for spamming which is probably the best use of Googles project. OpenSocial never takes off.

 Well thats a few of my predictions of 2008, I guess I will be watching these things to see what will happen. In the meantime, head over to Jonzee.com to check out my 2008 predictions for gadgets and consumer products.