Given the current economy, there may be fewer applications and services to try next year. Whatever will we early adopters do? We love to flit from service to service, trying the latest shiny new thing, endlessly discussing whether or not it will stick, whether it will "cross the chasm." Without the endless barrage of new services being released one after another, in 2009 we may find ourselves having to more deeply embrace the ones we have left. More importantly, we'll finally have the time to figure out how we can really integrate them (or not) into our daily lives.

As we discover how to better manage the social media apps we added to our daily workflow during 2008, we may end up turning a more critical eye towards any newcomers in 2009. Enriched with a better understanding that doesn't come just from being enamored of "shininess," but from experiences that grew over time, we may question the new arrivals in ways we never did before. What value does this bring me?, we'll ask. Is this really doing anything new?

Thankfully, the answer to that last one will likely be "yes," as the funding possibilities for straight up clones of popular services will probably be dialed back in 2009.

What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better

For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves drawn to the apps, services, and features that helped us better organize the madness that is information overload. We added our friends to lists in both FriendFeed and Tweet Deck, we categorized our RSS feeds and even cleared out some for good, we de-friended the strangers we had collected on Facebook, we synced our social network friend lists, and we found ways to multi-post to our preferred networks. Yes, we became more efficient..but there's still so much room for improvement.

Our Social Media Wish List

Perhaps next year, we'll see more apps that help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day. We have some thoughts about what we would like to see and we hope that 2009 will bring these ideas to fruition.

• Google Reader add-ins and/or Greasemonkey scripts:We want Labs for Google Reader! It seems Google is more interested in revamping the Reader UI than giving us any real tools to deal with our RSS overload. If they won't help, then someone else should. We would love to see tools that let us view our feeds based on our attention data, without having to manually reorganize the feeds ourselves. We also want duplicates marked as read - if we read a friend's shared item from a feed we subscribe to, why do we have to see it again as we plow through our unread feeds? Finally, we need tools that let us better filter our subscriptions to reduce noise. Why can't we click a button to hide all the posts where someone has spliced in their delicious links or Twitter updates, for example?
• Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard? The tools could parse our friends' Twitter profiles, for example, to categorize people based on location, business, or company. All the local people could be in one list. Everyone whose profile says "SEO" in another. Anyone in the top 50 or 100 users (based on followers/friends) in a third list called "noteworthy." Just because we want to customize and personalize our lists doesn't mean we couldn't use a little help getting started with the task.
• More Friend Synchronization tools: We want to friend you - really we do - but it's hard because you're here and there and everywhere. To make matters worse, you don't even use the same username on Digg as you do on Twitter. How will we ever find you? What we want is a tool that allows us to friend people, with one click on all the networks we possibly can, according to our preferences. It should also be able to delve into our social graph and sync up the friends we have already added.
• Friend List Sanitizers: OK, we followed/friended you, but we don't know why. We don't know you, we don't have any friends in common, in fact, we think you might have requested our friendship by mistake. So why are you still in our Facebook friends list? We need tools that help us clean up our lists to remove the accidental "stranger friendings" left over from our MySpace days. Even better, the tool could compare our Facebook list to our FriendFeed or Twitter friends to see if we know you elsewhere in order to determine whether to retain or remove the friendship.

These are just a few social media tools we would like to see developed in 2009. What are yours?

The Information Valet Project

As more and more newspapers crumble, there is concern that we will lose major sources of vital news and information. The threat of online news, which is both abundant and free, has turned this industry on its head, forcing companies to come up with new models for making money. But which of those models will end up working is anyone's guess at this point. Some models are attempting to use crowdsourcing to pay reporters' salaries, while other companies are finding their niche as hyper-local sources of information. The new Information Valet project aims to do both and more.

With the Information Valet Project, paying customers wouldn't just get a simple web page dedicated to news. Instead, the project would deliver "a 24/7 platform-agnostic nerve center that finds, organizes, shares, and makes sense of information from a vast array of paid, volunteer, independent, and partisan sources - and then serves it how you want, when you want it."

What makes this project different than any ol' customizable web portal like iGoogle or My Yahoo, will be the way you pay for its services with your attention. In addition to the small monthly fee, the service would manage your attention to deliver premium content. So for example, when you look at an ad, that would create a payment that would be credited to an account where it will go to offset your purchase of premium content later on. This model effectively makes attention the currency with which you make your purchases./

In addition, the Information Valet will offer a one-stop shop of sorts for all your web registrations across the web and a safe and secure place where your privacy is protected.

So, It Does What Exactly?

If you're confused as to how this project is anything new or different than the news offerings out there today, you're not alone. There are so many different pieces to the project, it's kind of hard to get a grip on what exactly it is. The best explanation we found so far comes from Martin Langeveld, who described the various aspects of the Info Valet project as follows:

Content consumers/web users:

• Would register their personal data via InfoValet and would, in a secure system, retain complete control over who could access that information.
• By doing this, they would also gain the convenience and security of not having to enter a raft of data over and over each time they register at another site to access information or make purchases. Their personal information would reside in only one place on the web.
• In return for allowing selective access to their personal data, they would gain two important benefits: (1) access to information more tailored to their demographics, needs and interests, and (2) a system of rewards in the form of cash or points based on their web usage and exposure to advertising content. These rewards would be greater if they are willing to share, selectively, a larger amount of personal information with advertisers for targeting purposes.

Content providers including newspaper web sites:

• Would act as portals through which content consumers initially sign up for InfoValet. As such they could gain a share of future transactions, including ad-viewing rewards, associated with individuals they have signed up--even when those users are elsewhere on the web.
• Would be able to sell and host advertising targeted more precisely at site visitors by means of InfoValet registrations

Commercial content providers/advertisers:

• Would benefit from more efficient, better targeted ways of advertising to InfoValet registered consumers, published through "trusted nodes"--local brands through which consumers have signed up for infoValet
• Could send new, more welcome forms of commercial content to InfoValet consumers

Could This Work?

For something like this to succeed it will take a good bit of effort. Internet users are used to information being free, and will balk at the idea of having to pay for it. The additional services that make this project compelling and valuable will also have to be easy for the average internet user to understand, and - let's face it - we're not there yet. However, as news giant Rupert Murdoch recently stated, the future of newspapers goes beyond dead trees. In other words, now may not be the time to summarily dismiss new ideas such as this without first giving them some serious thought. The current business model for newspapers may not be working, but we've yet to develop what the next model may be. Could this be it? We'll have to wait and see, but at the moment it looks like an uphill battle.

You can learn more about the Information Valet project here, read the summary PDF, or view the PowerPoint.

Barnes says his new service Panels.net gets reader engagement numbers above 10% - an astonishing number in advertising. He says that's because his Panels are genuinely useful. At first blush they strike us as a little awkward but the potential here is big. Well selected, up-to-the-minute info about any link we see online sounds like a great idea - if it works.

Panels.net requires one line of Javascript to be added to web pages. The service then ads a little icon to any link that goes to an "entity" - like a person or business. The links can be styled to your liking as a publisher, and when hovered over they produce a pop up "panel."

There's a site: search function for any domain in its panel, there's info pulled in from the Crunchbase database, there's a lot of information available in these little panels.

The variety of information is quite diverse and Barnes says what's served up is customized depending on what kind of entity you're looking at. You can see Panels in action over on Barnes' personal blog; the service will be rolled out to bloggers over the coming months.

Serious Technology

This isn't a fly-by-night organization deciding to throw a handful of RSS feeds into a Javascript pop-up either. Craig Barnes is a four time CEO who started then sold for $140 million what's now one of the top handful of font management software companies in the world, Extensis, in 2001. He then served as the CEO for venture backed enterprise RSS company Attensa. Now he's out on his own, making hires and getting ready to launch a service for which neither the market nor the storage and delivery technology was prepared when he thought of it years ago.

Is it Unobtrusive?

As many of us found out with the recent launch of Google SearchWiki, adding symbols to a familiar, simple web page can be very disruptive. Ostensible Panels competitor Snap has faced years of criticism for their over-eager pop-ups.

We're not sure how Panels scores on obtrusiveness. Its popups are polite and relatively attractive, but the icons you have to click on to launch them are a little hard to swallow. It's a very fine line for services like this between being invisible and being used. We don't know what the solution is, but we do know it's a big issue.

Is it Truly Useful?

Fortunately the usefulness is immediately apparent when you look at a Panels popup. If you're interested in an organization's web traffic, financial trends, recent mentions in the press - and many of us are - then for many links Panels will serve you well.

Is it Up to Date and Well Populated?

Barnes says that a signifigant amount of thought has been put into caching much of the information served up through Panels. That's smart and we hope it will make a big difference. When we tested the panels they were sometimes a little slow to respond and many of the display options just said "coming soon." We would need to see this resolved before we were to, for example, put Panels on our site.

Is It Intelligently Delivered?

There are some decisions that can be presumed in the user experience here that don't appear to be now. We need clicks to be kept to a minimum. If, for example, we've clicked on 3 Panels icons on a page and navigated to the website traffic numbers first for each of them - then we'd like to have the panel pop up and go immediately to the website traffic view. (Update: On second look, it appears this is done to some degree, at least the first level of navigation is repeated in subsequent Panels.)

The point is that the user experience needs to be as smooth as turning a box of cereal around to look right at its nutritional panel. Right now the user experience doesn't quite feel that easy.

It's early days, but we hope the company is prioritizing user experience. We suspect that forthcoming improvements in browser handling of Javascript will also help make Panels smoother to use.

Long Range Outlook

Panels is a very good idea. If it can be executed upon well, and overcome the kinds of obstacles listed above, then we think this just-launched startup has as good a chance as any. We want it to work better than it does today, but we're sure it will.

Key information available about people and companies online could soon be at our fingertips at a moment's notice as we browse the web. That really is how it ought to be.