I was right that the number of people blogging would continue to fall, but I was wrong that a digital news company was going to acquire a major legacy news organization. We were wrong about a few other things, too: Mobile payments didn't become mainstream, we didn't write a post called "Flickr: In Memoriam," and there was no severe privacy breach at a location-based service.

What's in store for 2012? Here are a few of our predictions (and more of our misses from last year). Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1. The Associated Press released its automated style checking software this week; 2012 will see the rise of some kind of rudimentary fact-checking equivalent. Serious bloggers and journalists will flock to it but fact checking won't help the fact that there posts will stile bee filed with typos.
2. The relative success of the New York Times' paywall (and others) will drive more experiments in getting people to pay for online content. Thanks to the Times' example, a lot newspapers and magazines will realize their print product doesn't have to be an albatross around their neck. As a result of package print/digital deals, newspaper circulation rates will slow their fall? No, that can't be right.
3. The legacy journalism world finally began to steal ideas - accelerators, venture capital funds - that the tech world has been doing for many years. That adoption will continue at a depressingly slow rate in 2012.
What other 2011 predictions did we get wrong?

• Cablegate will pale in comparison to the secret information about governments and corporations that is released by Wikileaks and similar organizations, which will continue to crop up around the world.
• Fantastic new tools for analyzing and displaying big data will appear.
• Readers' Choice for Time's Person of the Year: Anonymous
• Telephony will continue to become more about messaging. Email, collaboration tools, activity stream technologies and other apps will further integrate with telephony APIs.
4. Curation tools like Instapaper will still be something that everyone likes, very few people do well, and only a infinitesimal few ever make money on. The long-awaited brawl between publishers and those tools will never happen. The audience for that kind of curation, while growing, will remain small in comparison to the number of people visiting those stories on the publishers' sites.
5. We will still be stuck with insidious buzzwords like gamification, filter bubble, clicktivism, robust and, *shudder*, mocial.

John Paul Titlow, Writer

1. Apple will release an HDTV set, but it will be little more than a television running the Apple TV flavor of iOS. The user experience will be nice, but the device won't kill cable or turn the industry on its head just yet.
2. Joining Zite, one of the other popular news reading apps for the iPad will be bought by a big tech or media company. These apps still won't be profitable.
3. By the June 2012, Instagram's user base will have doubled from what it is today. Its Android app, once it's finally released, will be a big help.
4. By the summer, Google TV will not in fact be included on the majority of new TV sets.
5. The iPhone 5 will launch and include NFC technology for mobile payments, contactless data transfer and other innovative uses. Apple's integration will begin to wow mainstream consumers, but the tech still won't be widely adopted for a few more years.
6. Location-based social networks like Foursquare will continue grow in popularity, but will still be a far cry from reaching mainstream status by the end of 2012. The concept will be made more palatable among everyday consumers thanks to their continued exposure to check-ins on Facebook and better promotional deals and coupons at local businesses for Foursquare users.
7. We'll see a substantial increase in HTML5-fueled mobile Web apps as companies and publishers learn that it frees them from app store restrictions and is cheaper since it offers cross-platform support without having to code for every mobile OS individually. Still, the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace will also continue to grow.
8. At least three notable artists will pull their catalogs from Spotify, Rdio, MOG or all three over concerns about royalty payments.
9. Left in the dust in the mobile space and engaged in ongoing legal battles, Grooveshark will shut down or otherwise be rendered a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.
10. Your non-techie friends will finally start using Google+.

Dan Rowinski, Writer

1. Evernote will make a startlingly large acquisition that sets it up for mainstream success for years to come. Everyone will ask: how did Evernote get so much money?
2. Facebook's IPO will cause an exodus of top talent from the company that creates a new class of venture capitalist and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in much the same way as the "Google Millionaires" did a little less than a decade ago.
3. Google+ will become a truly international platform with more than150 million users. Most people will still decry it as useless.

4. A major corporation will get in trouble with privacy violations on a scale that most users cannot even fathom yet. Forget the Apple location tracking or whatever Facebook does or does not do. Carrier IQ could be the seed of this.
5. A U.S. President will be elected and the pundits will all say, "well, he/she had a really good social media campaign that carried them through the process."
6. Barack Obama will be reelected.
7. The city of Boston will have a couple high profile tech success stories and people will begin to say "Boston is back."
8. A major breakthrough in real artificial intelligence will be made at a university, large corporation or by the U.S. military.
9. The world will not end on Dec. 21, 2012. But, the spammers will make a fortune from the hysteria.
10. Either Hulu or Netflix will be acquired. One or the other, not both.

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Yahoo! finds a buyer. More Yahoo! properties are divested and sunset as a result.
2. Groupon sinks as quickly as it grew. Enthusiasm for daily deals comes back to earth.
3. Apple names the next iPhone something other than the iPhone 5.
4. Google+ becomes a legitimate contender for business collaboration, making Citrix sit up and take notice.
5. Flash survives 2012 on the desktop as a vehicle for video playback as Adobe builds and refines its tools for HTML5.

Joe Brockmeier, Writer

1. Microsoft will buy Netflix, and use Netflix as a driver for its Xbox and Windows 8 Tablets.
2. Twitter goes through at least one (more) major redesign, but keeps the character count at 140 as nature intended.
3. Yahoo will finally be sold to a surprise buyer.
4. Web series, like the short series Dr. Horrible and like "The Guild" will take off in a major way in 2012.

5. Reputation systems like Klout will flounder when people realize Klout "perks" are not worth playing the status anxiety game.
6. NFC payments, at least in North America, continue to be a niche offering. People are slow to adopt new payment options, and it will take years before NFC is widely accepted or used.
7. Mozilla launches its own, federated social network as an open and privacy friendly alternative to Facebook, Google+ and others.
8. Evernote introduces a file-sharing app or add-on that competes with Dropbox and Box.net.
9. Apple introduces its first actual television. The world recoils in horror at the price tag.
10. The "datapocalypse" caused by the shortage of hard drives following the Thailand floods impact cloud services. The price for online storage stays constant, or actually goes up.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

In the context of the 2011 social network battle of 2011, Facebook lost in the Identity category (you can't use pseudonyms on Facebook). In the Sharing category, however, Facebook came out as the obvious winner.

At the f8 developers' conference this past September, Facebook announced the launch of new Timeline profiles, frictionless sharing, Spotify integration and its vision for Facebook's Open Graph platform. A few months after f8, Facebook hired the engineers and developers behind Gowalla. (As a result, Gowalla will shut down.)

What Will Happen In 2012? In short: A lot. Facebook is aggressively hiring and is expected to go public in 2012 with a ridiculously high $100 billion valuation. I predict that frictionless sharing will continue to ramp up, especially in the areas of news and video-sharing. With the expert Gowalla engineers and designers onboard, I can see Facebook tweaking its Timeline so it's better at actually telling stories rather than just presenting people with a ton of visual information. The news feed will probably become more customizable and personalized, giving users some of the control they demand. I think Facebook will converge its UIs into a single platform, and everything will be optimized for mobile. In fact, mobile will be Facebook's number one focus. The long-rumored Facebook phone will finally come out, but it will bomb. By the end of 2012, I predict that Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark.

E-Commerce

In 2012, I predict that Groupon and LivingSocial will scale back on employees. Then it will increase the frequency and personalization of its deals. In fact, I predict that personalization and time-limited, location-based deals will be key for the future of daily deals.

Social networking-turned-flash sale sites like Fab.com will continue to grow.

The Facebook-EBay integration will be Facebook's last attempt at f-commerce before it finally gives up.

Digital customer loyalty programs like Belly will grow as merchants realize that they need a way to keep their customers coming back. In 2012, I predict that mobile commerce and couch commerce will explode.

Next page: What Will Happen To Location and Social Networks in 2012?

Location

Social Networks

I predict that Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will grow and thrive in 2012. Pinterest, a relative newcomer to the social network game (it actually bills itself as a social bookmarking site) will also keep expand. I also predict that we'll start seeing more visually focused, tablet-friendly user interfaces like Delicious'. People will increasingly access social networks from their mobile devices and tablets.

What do you think will happen in 2012? Do you agree or disagree with my predictions? Let me know in the comments below.

Chief among these changes and challenges, the use of mobile and social technology in two related movements: the Arab Spring and #occupy.

When it comes to the Arab Spring, the Internet was turned off in Egypt for only the second time in history for an entire country. Then the country's imperial president was turned out and joy erupted all over the Middle East and beyond.

That story went back and forth so many times there is simply not room to recount it all here. It currently rests teetering on a knife's edge between a fall back into tyranny and a rough drive out and up. Technology will feature in it, but exactly how and to what end is unknowable and, in my case, frankly unimaginable.

If it were a movie, it would be a thriller.

#occupy

When it came to the Occupy Movement, it has been said lately that it's gone global and that it's done so by traveling along the backbone of the Internet. It might be more accurate to say that Occupy is the Western iteration of the Arab Spring, adapted to "first world" nations' worries - like the money-fueled corruption of the political process, the bankrupting of the people by their financial institution, the use of religious and cultural rhetoric to wage war...

You know. Western stuff?

If it were a movie, it would be kitchen-sink realism.

Africa

If there were a single thing I feel confident in predicting, it would be the increasing importance of Africa. Although I had been interested in, and had written about, Africa for several years, my trip there this year, the opportunity to see the vibrant Afro Nerd Superstar entrepreneurial culture with my own eyes, opened me up viscerally to the energy and opportunities on the continent.

And mine were not the only eyes from which the scales fell. Others included Wired and Forbes.

As I wrote in the article that concluded my Technotransect series:

"Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward, according to a recent study. Anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to swell the ranks of the "if I had invested $100 in Apple in 1981 I'd be a billionaire" crowd. I fear that the government itself, as well as the large tech companies so avid for the continent's growing purchasing power, may be among them. But that won't matter to the Afro Nerd Superstars. They've got things to do."

If it were a movie, it might just be a Horatio Alger story.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: There will be major opportunities and innovations around big data - storage, processing, analytics. "Data-driven" will be the new buzzword. "Data scientist" will be the new hot job. So in the spirit of the film The Graduate, I want to say one word to you. Just one word. "Statistics."

3: Peer-to-peer services will expand, in part as a response to #2. P2P technologies and networks will improve, and new services will spring up that privilege trusted relationships.

4: "Not dead yet," squeaks the Web. Thank you, HTML5.

5: Investor dollars will flow into the education technology sector, and there will be lots of acquisition activity in ed-tech as many large media, publishing, and tech companies stake their claim in the space. But there will also be several ed-tech scandals (test-score related) and failures (yes, Kno).

6: Openly-licensed content - open education resources, open source, open data - will thrive, as more people question outmoded intellectual property laws. Nonetheless, there'll still be patent and copyright infringement lawsuits aplenty.

7: Mobile payments will explode, and our phones will increasingly become our wallets. The growth will not lie solely with apps and in-app purchases on smartphones, but will come from carrier billing arrangements on all types of mobile phones.

8: Tablets will be the hot device of 2011 - a lot of new buyers, a lot of new manufacturers. Most of the latter will suck, and the iPad will continue to dominate sales (and app sales) until late in the year when a decent Android tablet is released. Despite over a year to prepare, it will fail to have a better name than "iPad."

9: Maker Fairs will flourish. Hobbyists will build mind-blowingly cool projects. And inspired by the likes of Kinect, Scratch, and LegoMindstorms, legions of kids will be inspired to become builders and hackers.

10: My mom will join Facebook.

Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the predictions, the more risk of them not coming true! Without further ado, here are my predictions for 2011 - 5 serious and 1 not so serious.

2: eBooks will hit 20% market penetration by the end of 2011. In 2010, the Association of American Publishers reported that eBooks made up 9.03% of total consumer book sales - compared to 3.31% at the close of 2009. I'm predicting this growth to rocket in 2011, thanks to a plentiful supply of cheap eReaders and a long overdue price war on eBooks between Amazon, Barnes&Noble and others. I predict it will reach 20%, in other words one in five books in 2011 will be sold as an eBook. If that bold prediction comes true, it will be great news for book consumers and will silence eBook skeptics about the future of eBooks. Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting paper books will go away, just that eBooks become much more popular and utilized.

3: Internet of Cars will be the surprise hit of the year. This year we saw further commercialization of services that connect everyday objects to the Internet. In 2011, I predict that cars (not smart homes, smart grids, etc.) will be where the most innovation and mainstream attention happens for Internet of Things technologies. Apps like AutoBot will gain traction over 2011.

4: Internet TV tips and gets huge consumer uptake. In 2010 there was a lot of progress in this sector: Apple TV re-design, Google TV, Boxee, Roku, Clicker and other developments. Most of this activity was largely experimental though, in that no one vendor got the formula quite right. For example, the launch problems of Google TV at the end of this year. However in 2011, consumers will flock to these products as they mature and more Internet TV content is made available - particularly in the U.S. market, but hopefully to international markets too.

Picking a breakout product is difficult, as each of the main players offers something different. I don't think there will be a breakout product, although Google has the broadest capabilities and so it has the potential to become one if it gets the product right. I predict that Google won't dominate this market though; and neither will Apple.

5: A major pop music star will do something amazing with web technologies, that blows open the online music scene. Arcade Fire set the scene in 2010, with their experimental collaboration with Google on an HTML5-fueled interactive video. In 2011, I expect an even bigger star - someone innovative like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, or a totally new star - to do something that re-defines what music means online. That could be something new in a live show, a music video, or something completely unexpected. To get more specific, I'll bet on something that blends a live album with internet technologies - which sells unexpectedly well and thus sets a trend in the music industry.

6: Bonus prediction: by the end of 2011, the most viewed YouTube video of all time will no longer be Justin Bieber. Instead it will be a collaboration between an unknown comedian and a breakout new baby. I'm envisaging a combination of comedy tap dancing and baby giggling (perhaps recorded using an auto-tune device). Yes, 2011 will mark the return of viral comedy and laughing babies to the top of the YouTube charts - this time as a duet!

For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.

1. Social media will be supersized

Following the success of various social media SaaS vendors and application providers, and fueled by ‘Apple envy,’ in 2011 we will see a surge of service providers bundling social networks, engagement widgets, video, mobile capabilities, cloud services and analytics, with their own unique services and proprietary capabilities. Ad agencies, for example, will offer bundles that include layers of creative strategy, campaign management and advertising deals all handled through a central dashboard; telecommunications companies will offer video tools for businesses and consumers with greater bandwidth, storage and syndication; learning management systems (LMS) integrators will add engagement, archiving, training and collaboration tools for a deeper and more engaging academic experience. By the end of the year, using today’s à la cart solutions will seem as efficient as buying a pocket knife with only a bottle opener in it.

2. Companies will integrate social feedback into their decision making process

In 2011 we will see a growing number of companies finally go beyond using social channels merely for building awareness and providing support. As “social thinkers,” these companies will use the social engine to inform strategic decisions, and execute on the organization’'s objectives, marketing plans, product roadmaps and more. “It’s not just about technology, it’s about a fundamental shift into a new age of leadership with new type of executives who behave and operate in new ways,” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO. Expect to see a rise in companies who, by end of year, will be recognized for socially-informed innovation, customer focus and work environment, —much like Zappos and Amazon were a few years back.

3. Mobile will become our gateway to the world

2010 marked the year in which infrastructure, technology and design finally intersected in the mobile space. For the first time, sales of smartphones outpaced sales of desktops and laptops, iPhone and iPad applications were downloaded more than 7 billion times and research shows e-mail access is now on the rise on the iPhone while declining on the computer.

With the foundation in place, in the coming year we will witness the scales tip: Mobile device users will interact with content, companies and the Web more on their phones and iPads than on their computers, and IT and service providers will create solutions that are defined by our mobile consumption and use behaviors. “The highway has been there but until now we needed a special car to get us to our destination, so the average pedestrian was not going to get there. Now that technology barriers have been lowered, mobile will become an extension of who we are,” said Philippe Suchet, CEO of MyShopanion, and the recipient of the Web2.0’ Summit 2010 award for most innovative startup in the mobile shopping category.

From social shopping on the go, to easy paperless transactions and check-ins, to watching (and creating) videos with friends abroad, to in-class learning and collaboration, to managing our health real-time - prepare for an explosion of connected experiences across all points of interactions between people and people, people and companies, and people and information in the cloud.

Photo by LotusHead

4. Video will be everywhere

With plummeting video delivery costs and highly accessible and flexible video management platforms (like Brightcove, Ooyala, and the open-source platform Kaltura*), custom-use of video by enterprises online, on mobile devices, and across screens is on the rise across all sectors.

Consumer’ engagement with video will also continue to rise. In October alone, 5.4 billion videos were viewed - 2 billion of these on Facebook. “People today can shoot and share HD videos from their phone. The user experience is getting to the same level as broadcast or professional media from an image quality standpoint. Image acquisition is entirely changing content production,” said Brett Leonard, renowned writer and director and pioneer of “frag” technology in the movie industry.

In the coming year, gaps in our video experience will be filled with the integration of filtering, tagging, editing and locating tools into each and every video feed. Both companies and consumers will increasingly rely on video to provide information and behavioral cues that are not otherwise present in texts, tweets and status updates, making video a critical component of the value chain for its impact on shaping people’s' perception about companies and about each other.

5. The next big Online Social Network will not be a network at all

Social networks have transformed human access capabilities much like modern transportation and the telephone did over 150 years ago. But they are also changing the very structure of our relationships— - flattening our naturally varying levels of intimacy in real life.

In the coming year we will see the rise of dynamic, engaging, easy-to-use community platforms and applications like Diaspora, Path and Looppa* that will better mimic and facilitate the innate way people seek to manage relationships. “People today look for more personalized, authentic, private information (where we make) a ‘social contract’ around a topic or context that is beyond the reach of search engine results and Facebook crowds,” said Dave Blakely, director of technology strategy at IDEO.

For consumers, this means the ability to create smaller, more intimate, context-specific communities using their existing social graph and livestreams. For companies, this means the ability to facilitate a custom-branded, dynamic and engaging experience on their online properties in ways not possible on Facebook. “Every company should think of itself as a media company,” said Tom Foremski, journalist and thought-leader.

As they become more social, on their own turfs, companies will once again own their customer relationships and brand in a whole new way, —ultimately building greater community value for both the company and its customers.

6. ROI will be redefined

When it comes to ROI, it seems that companies want to cook gourmet risotto but most are still busy washing the rice: Despite 2010 being a year filled with ROI discussions and some strong case studies, Forrester research shows that most companies still have no clue how to meaningfully measure ROI.

As brands move this year from being on social media to using the social media ecosystem, ROI metrics will finally evolve beyond counting ‘likes’ and comments. Aligning with actionable business objectives and their corresponding metrics will be critical to being able to demonstrate repeatable contribution to the bottom line. Companies who hire social media strategists with proven marketing analytics background and business strategy experience will have the upper hand and will place first in the race to cracking the ROI code.

7. Psychology is shifting

Until now, human psychology has been regarded slow to change. In the coming year we will begin to see evidence that we are, in fact, witnessing a growing psychological plasticity.

“We have changed the importance of time, geography, age— and the assumption of how the world works. We have new levels of cognitive flexibility, which is creating a new way of thinking about the world and about ourselves,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center and co-founder of A Think Lab.

Once feeling powerless to fight against personal and cultural injustices, today people know they have the power to voice their grievances, the tools to bring about change and the ability to take control of their experiences.

As the constructs of relationships, privacy and our ability to influence others evolve, we will also face important questions: How do we respond to the changing definition of relationships? How does the elimination of behavioral cues, only available face-to-face, impact our ability to connect? How does our need for emotional balance get addressed in the face of constant change?

In the coming year, companies wishing to succeed should already start to set practices and create a charter to understand the intersection between technology and psychology. Focusing on behaviors is no longer sufficient.

8. Citizen activism brings back purpose and power

With the power made possible by social technologies to connect, inform and mobilize, we will see a surge in self-organized and managed citizen activism. “Value will come from being able to facilitate groups as a human infrastructure—, not from technology,” says Andrea Saveri, a thought-leader and researcher at the intersection of foresight and strategy.

Wikipedia and Mozilla FireFox are early and ongoing examples of the value of the connected human infrastructure; many more, including Causecast, and OpenIDEO, as well as lesser known projects like It Gets Better will light up the grid. By the end of the year we may each join a group of people we have never met in order to take part in bringing about change in completely new ways.

9. Social business intelligence will heat up and so will privacy

As we become ever more connected, and rely on giants like Apple and Google to funnel our most personal information, the field of social business intelligence, and with it, our privacy, will move to the spotlight. Wikileak’s' eruption on the social media waves and Do Not Track are just previews. Every company now looks to tap into the boundless user data being collected in the cloud. While personalized, targeted experience can be extremely valuable in helping companies and consumers cut through the clutter, the line between perceived use and abuse can be thin at times, as data mining and targeted ad delivery pioneer RapLeaf saw in past months.

In the year ahead we will witness (and be part of) major data virtualization initiatives designed to map our activities, preferences and choices. Mechanisms designed to triangulate our mobile, online and physical information will yield more accurate information than our Social Security numbers can. We will see fierce regulation battles and hear about companies who use our data to test boundaries— and our trust. When done, Tom Cruise’'s shopping scene in Minority Report will seem as sophisticated as scenes from Time Tunnel in the 1970’s.

10. The role of the social media strategist will be changing

The glory days when social media strategists rose to stardom overnight (and too often, with little relevant experience) are finally over. Social media roles today focus on tangible, results-driven capabilities within the organizational structure and processes. Hiring managers are more informed and better connected, making it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In 2011, social media strategists will need to contend with much more actionable, and often mundane, tasks such as selecting and piloting new tools, integrating social widgets and analytics, helping to educate the organization, and integrating social-based thinking into the organization’'s process and culture. Process design, stakeholder management, strategic planning, and the ability to manage large projects within complex environments will all be required.

Strategists looking to remain inspired and work at the cutting edge will have to look outside today'’s leading corporations. Some of the most interesting social media work will come from new media digital agencies, smaller innovative companies, international companies who are just entering the field and late-to-adopt sectors such as health, finance and insurance.

In the year ahead we will see more of the same: more users on Facebook, more videos, more social media widgets, more tools, more devices, more applications. But it will also be a year of important accomplishments and fundamental shifts in our thinking, behavior and psychology. As social media and social technologies integrate deeper into our daily lives and across vast audiences, our areas of focus will begin to transform.

Companies will begin to overhaul their internal structures and decision-making processes even if at a fairly superficial levels at first; consumers will seek to make sense of their evolving relationships, always-on connectedness, and to redefine value and meaning.

As we finally surface from social media stimulus overload, the questions we will ask in the coming year should not be about technology but about what it enables, what it jeopardizes and about how we, as the connected collective, want to shape the years to come.

(Disclaimer: Companies marked with * are Ustrategy clients.)

As MIT notes, that's an incredible result. Maybe too incredible. The article then questioned some of the methodology involved with this project. For example, tweets from around the world were used instead of just U.S.-based ones, which seems an odd choice given that the intention was an analysis of the U.S. stock market. However, during 2008, Twitter's user population was largely American, so this factor alone does not entirely discount the study.

Calmness Linked to Stock Market Changes

What's interesting about this analysis of Twitter moods is that out of the six states GPOMS measures - happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness - it's the last one, calmness, that's most useful in predicting stock market changes. None of the other indices, including those from OpinionFinder - a more general positive/negative sentiment indicator - reflected any stock market changes.

The researchers admit that they don't know why or how this selection of Twitter.com user feeds was able to make predictions so accurate, and they say more research is needed.

Using Twitter to track the stock market is nothing new: StockTwits, for example, is an online community of investors where users sign in with their Twitter account to keep track of stock-related news. The service pulls in tweets tagged with a $ before a stock symbol (ex.: $AAPL). Competing service FINIF Financial Informatics, does something similar - it gathers sentiment reports in real-time from SEC filings, news headlines and Twitter. FINIF scans all recent Twitter updates that reference a stock symbol and then measures the sentiment using a custom word list to create the "sentiment score" for a given stock.

However, neither service purports to offer stock predictions on this level based on either the news or the fluctuating "moods" of the Twitter user base. In the future, perhaps, that may change, as this sentiment analysis research continues.

2008 Year in Review

In case you missed our 2008 Year in Review series in December, here's a re-cap of the posts we did -- and you can find these and other top stories in our Best of ReadWriteWeb page.

• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008
• RWW Live Special: 2008 Year in Review (RWW Live is our regular podcast show: subscribe in iTunes)
• Top 100 Products of 2008

The Top 100 Products of 2008 was comprised of the following 10 lists:

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

That was 2008, let's now turn our attention to 2009...

2009 Web Predictions

At the beginning of the new year, we posted our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media.

check out our predictions for '09 and please contribute your own in the comments to that post.

iTunes Goes DRM Free

The first week of January is Macworld time. While this year's conference had no major product announcements, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

Also from Macworld: Apple's iWork Goes (Partly) Online

Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accounts Hacked

The start of 2009 brought a major security scare for one of 2008's top web products, Twitter. Days after a wave of phishing attacks fooled thousands of Twitter users, another security hole was found. Obama's account, unused since election day, sent out an affiliate link to a survey with a gas card prize, Fox News said that "Bill O'Reily is gay" and Britney Spears' account made a lewd post about her anatomy. Rick Sanchez, the Twitter loving CNN anchor, says he's "high on crack and might not be coming into work today." Twitter eventually said that the issue had been resolved, but that users should change their passwords.

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Babylon is the world's leading dictionary and translation software.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

January Kicks Off With Cool Hires in Tech

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

RWW Live: Running a Startup in a Down Economy

In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackled an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. The ReadWriteWeb authors were joined by entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'. In the podcast they had some excellent advice for startups, which you can listen to below and read about in our post-show round-up.

Download MP3

Brave New World: More Digital, Less Physical

Alex Iskold writes: "Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around."

Report: Apple Dominates the Mobile Web

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Report: Cloud-Based Email Cheapest Option for Most Companies

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain in this post.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Looking back at our 2008 Web predictions, we got some of them right! "The big Internet companies will [embrace] open standards" (Google, Yahoo and others did this); "Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008" (check!); "Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground" (Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine were released and AWS grew). We also got some wrong, including most of our acquisition picks! Digg, Twitter, Zoho, Tumblr - all remain independent. Not to be deterred, we've made new acquisition predictions for '09... although the names will be familiar ;-)

Richard MacManus

1. iTunes adds social networking features; but it's still a closed development system.
2. Facebook signs up to OpenSocial; whether or not this happens, there's no doubt that Google will continue to collect big name supporters for the various open standards initiatives which it has started in the last couple of years.
3. Yahoo sells to a big media company, but it won't be Microsoft; Yahoo getting bought is a big call and I hope I'm wrong about it - but e.g. I could see the likes of Rupert Murdoch swooping in if things get much worse for the former dot com high flyer.
4. Microsoft releases a cool online version of Office, but then Google releases an amazing new version of Google Docs; Microsoft promised the first bit at PDC '08, but when that launches I forsee it being trumped soon after by Google releasing a more powerful version of its browser-based Google Docs. One that is comparable in user experience (but not features, because that is unnecessary) to MS Word. This new version of Google Docs may be limited to Chrome at first, but it will get a lot of attention and scare the bejeebers out of Redmond.
5. Health web apps start getting attention from mainstream people and media; big breathless profiles from the likes of CNN, Time magazine, etc. Unfortunately health system red tape remains a tangly mess, for another year.
6. Apps that do filtering, inferring and recommendation have a great year; several will release plug-ins for Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook and other 'sipping from the firehose' apps.
7. The usual suspects will remain unacquired in '09: Digg, Twitter, Technorati. The one that does get bought is FriendFeed - by Google probably, given that it was created by ex-Googlers.
8. Media properties prominently experiment with different and innovative types of online advertising; in other words the move beyond CPM starts to actually happen, due to the down economy, after years of CPA type predictions. Related, a stunning new metric will emerge that accurately determines the success of media properties beyond mere page views (ok that one's wishful thinking maybe!).

Marshall Kirkpatrick

1. Lifestreams will continue to evolve; From the explosion of the newsfeed-powered Facebook to the experimental polling technology of FriendFeed, 2008 was a big year for the "lifestream" - the technology of aggregating data from all your activities on different social networks around the web. No one summed it up better than Mark Krynsky in his Lifestream Blog post The Year in Lifestreaming for 2008. In 2009, I'll be watching the parties above, but also MovableType's Motion, social media ping server Gnip, Strands on the iPhone and Chris Messina and friends' new working group on Activity Streams.
2. Facebook will continue to surprise; I love to hate Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg and company keep bringing me back to a state of...impressed. I wish open standards ruled the world, but Facebook Connect is so compelling that it can't be ignored. I'd like to see Data Portability prioritized a touch above full-blown privacy, but Facebook's relatively tame version of portability is getting real traction while others are stuck in the land of promises and proofs of concept.
3. Big companies will have incentive to give OpenID more support because of Facebook's domination; Support has been relatively tepid in the past. When you're winning, open standards aren't in your interest. When you aren't, they become much more appealing. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo - all have made meaningful moves to support OpenID before, but now that Facebook is clearly dominating them all, I expect to see these companies make bigger moves towards OpenID and other standards.
4. Have cake and eat it too solutions will emerge as a strong option; Have you seen JanRain's RPX plug-in? It lets users log in to a website using OpenID or proprietary methods, like Facebook Connect, through the same interface. It's really pretty, too. There are other examples of this kind of paradigm, but I expect to see them proliferate in the coming year.
5. One or two interface developments will blow us away; The iPhone inspired countless people about user interfaces, unlike anything else has in a long time. Somebody's going to blow our minds again. Information overload alone demands radical innovation, and it's in the works all around the world. Maybe it will be Mozilla, maybe it will be in gaming, perhaps in Adobe AIR, or it could be in Microsoft's Silverlight. May it not be a brain implant.

Sarah Perez

1. Twitter announces they have a plan to make money. They do.
2. New iPhone is released with video recording capabilities.
3. Facebook Connect becomes new de facto way to login to web sites.
4. Google Reader gets themes.
5. Digg still not acquired by anyone.
6. New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more in ways we never could have imagined.
7. Out of work journalists band together and create some killer blogs.
8. Google Chrome adds plugins...one of them is a Google plugin that lets you integrate Google Mail, Reader, & other Google products/services right into the browser.
9. Netbooks stay hot...get lighter, faster, thinner, but thanks to variable pricing from manufacturers, line between notebooks and netbooks blurs.
10. Google backlash begins.
11. Apple backlash does not.
12. New iPods released...now with VOIP app built-in. AT&T concerned.
13. Professional twitterer becomes a real job.

Bernard Lunn

1. VCs jump onto the SAAS bandwagon, but most ventures don't need the cash.
2. More Indian start-ups go global with price-smashing strategy.
3. 2009 will be like 2002 for raising money or exiting.
4. P2P shows value for reducing cost of server farms.
5. Consumer and regulatory backlash make online privacy into a key differentiator for major players.

Frederic Lardinois

1. Digg still won't be bought.
2. Twitter will start to embed advertising into its users streams as it slowly becomes mainstream.
3. Google will finally offer a comprehensive online storage solution and some kind of travel product.
4. Lifestreaming apps like FriendFeed will remain niche products that only serve the early adopter market.
5. Streaming web video to the living room will go mainstream.
6. If Apple finally enables its push server, mobile social networks and geolocation enabled apps will become a major topic next year.

Lidija Davis

1. Google loses goodwill, Yahoo gains.
2. Microsoft resurrects WebTV after buying out Netflix.
3. Mixx concentrates on usability and starts gaining ground on Digg.
4. Facebook has one security incident too many, leading to a decline in popularity.
5. The value of having a unified system for data portability and single sign-in services becomes unmistakable after a significant privacy breach.

Sean Ammirati

1. Twitter will be acquired (probably by Facebook--but multiple suitors will compete for the deal).
2. Due to new leadership and a slow economy that has people more focused on their professional network, LinkedIn will grow in the public's consciousness and more importantly grow their revenue dramatically.
3. Exciting new open source projects will emerge and grow due to a growing number of un/under employed engineers.
4. Unfortunately, Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method for authentication on the web (while this is my prediction, I'm still rooting for a more open solution).
5. Microsoft will launch a competing platform with Apple's App Store. The reaction from the market will be underwhelming.

Alex Iskold

1. Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is going to see further decline.
2. Amazon will further strengthen its position in the cloud computing market, by launching more of its Web Services and gaining more clients for existing ones.
3. More contextual browsing technologies will hit the market powered by improved top-down semantic recognition engines.
4. The browser wars will further heat up, with Google throwing marketing dollars and distribution deals behind Chrome.

Rick Turoczy

1. With the economy continuing to tank, Microsoft will double-down on its Facebook investment, garnering more control of the company - and more access to the data being gathered through Facebook Connect.
2. Google will finally solve the issues that have prevented its adoption of OpenID logins for all Google services. That, combined with EAUT, will make Gmail accounts the de facto login credential on the Web.
3. One of the major gaming platform companies - Nintendo, Sega, Sony - will begin acquiring small iPhone development shops in an effort to translate titles to the iPhone format and to corner the market on iPhone gaming.
4. Under pressure from iPhone, Android, Symbian, and RIM; Windows Mobile will attempt to reinvent itself. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it will be about as successful as Vista and the Zune.
5. eBay - the Yahoo! of 2009 - oscillates between break-up and acquisition. After a great deal of drama, it will eventually be acquired by Amazon and incorporated into its seller storefront offering.

There you have it, the picks of the ReadWriteWeb team; what about your predictions? Let us know in the comments, so we can check who among us all has gloating rights at the end of 2009.

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we've embedded below, but we thought we'd pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.

"Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust." - Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research

Our take: Much as we are concerned about the proprietary nature of Facebook Connect in particular, the ease with which people are able to see feedback left by people they know, with confirmed identities, really could be a game changer.

Access

"Twitter will continue to achieve legitimacy. But more than any push-channel, Twitter will give customers, advocates and critics unprecedented access to corporate personnel and vice versa." - Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company (Photo, right, by Wendy Piersall)

Our take: This makes sense, and it's pretty funny to think about. Even the biggest cynics often have a dramatic turn around about Twitter once they start using it, and the intimacy that develops is remarkable. We agree with Monty that this will become increasingly difficult to resist.

Measuring the success of social networks

"Implement listening programs through social media to get real time authentic knowledge that is actionable... Measure with customer service metrics like retention/ satisfaction & social metrics like engagement." - Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy (Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

"Slowly but surely, we're going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate 'commitment'-based marketing and yes, Mr Kim....they will extend beyond the rather short term, blunt metric called ROI". - Joseph Jaffe, Crayon

Our take: Good luck with that, we're not optimistic. This is soft stuff and though clear success speaks for itself, all the gradations between success and failure are going to be very hard to quantify.

Quality vs Quantity in Social Media

"I believe we'll have more focused velvet-rope social networks in 2009 where the tools and the goals match verticals of interest instead of the general commons of Facebook." - Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs

"Exclusivity trumps accessibility. Having thousands of friends becomes 'so 2008' and defriending becomes the hot new trend, driven by overwhelming rivers of newsfeeds." - Charlene Li, Altimeter Group (Photo by deneyterrio on Flickr)

Our take: Maybe, for some people and in some circumstances this will be the case. We expect most people to find a middle ground between the whole sale slow-down that some seem to expect and an evolutionary adjustment to vastly increased data input.

Making the most of limited budgets

"Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball. " - Ann Handley, Marketing Profs

"Companies will struggle with how to control who says what -- but will increasingly realize that in an economic downturn, they need all the marketing muscle and leverage they can get and actively encourage." - Charlene Li

Our take: This makes a lot of sense to us, but we expect that it will be tempered by the fear of totally blowing it. Getting into the social media space and doing it wrong is something that a lot of companies fear getting blown apart for. We expect that to change slowly and only for a limited number of companies.

Here's the full document embedded below - what do you think of these predictions?

• YouTube has brokered a deal with Viacom to run full-length episodes of television shows from CBS
• Hulu.com saw a 52.5% month over month increase in traffic in September 2008
• According to Reuters, YouTube boasts 330 million users and Hulu just 3.3 million users

We'd like your help in predicting what the percentage of Microsoft's share of searches will be by December of 2008 following the integration of Live Search on Facebook. Will it increase or decrease and by how much? Click here to cast your prediction.

• The arrangement was first announced in July and offers a revenue opportunity for both companies
• Microsoft owns a stake in Facebook and has an exclusive agreement with the site for banner ads
• Results vary on Facebook and Live.com because Facebook uses certain filters for their search results

Predicting Pandora's New Royalty Rate

In the past few weeks, Pandora was at the forefront of many headlines. The CEO of Pandora fought hard to win a small victory that would grant Internet radio stations more time to reach a new royalty rate agreement with the powers that be. The cut-off time is February 15, 2009, which is right around the corner. We'd like you to predict whether a new royalty rate agreement will be reached in time and what the new royalty rate will be.

Fast Facts

• Senate approved a bill that says Congress must honor any royalty rate agreement reached
• Webcasters and copyright holders have until February 15th to come up with a deal on their own
• Current royalty rates would cost Pandora $18 million of its estimated $25 million in revenue in 2008

We've still yet to have these rumors confirmed, but what if eBay were to actually sell StumbleUpon? Help us predict whether eBay will sell the service by the end of this year and if so, the price tag that it might fetch.

• Reports claim that eBay is in touch with Deutsche Bank to find a buyer.
• eBay purchased StumbleUpon for $75 million 16 months ago.
• In July 2008, StumbleUpon had 1.3 million worldwide visitors, down from 4.4 million a year prior.

Stumble Upon Our Discussion

In addition to reading your predictions, we'd also like to know your thoughts on what this might mean for StumbleUpon community members. Here are some things to discuss in the comments section:

• Will StumbleUpon's growth continue to decrease if the rumors are true?
• If you're a StumbleUpon user, what are your thoughts on how the StumbleUpon community may be affected by a sell?
• If StumbleUpon doesn't sale, what do you think eBay will do with the service?

Looking at the latest data, Hitwise predicts that Google would either enter the automotive or music market next. Both of these are very broad categories with a large range of competitors already operating in them, but then, that has never stopped Google from entering a new market.

Google Autos

Google could easily build a competitor to cars.com, Vehix, or Autotrader by tying together data from its Google Base product (which already has a 'Vehicles' category) and mashing it up into a more comprehensive used car market by also allowing users (or dealers) to easily put up their own cars for sale. As of now, Google is only aggregating data from all the major online car buying sites.

Google Music

Rumors about Google Music have flared up regularly over the last few years, but so far, no actual product has materialized. Entering the music business is obviously fraught with problems for any new player. Given the issues around licensing music, as well as its failure in selling videos on Google Videos, Google might not want to develop a mainstream music platform.

What Google could do, though, would be to offer a platform for independent musicians, somewhat akin to what MySpace was in its early days or what AmieStreet does today.

Google Travel

Given Google's background in search, we think Google might also be likely to develop a competitor to the large travel aggregator sites like Kayak or FareCompare. Not only is this a market where Google could develop a decent revenue stream outside of its core advertising market, but it would fit in right with Google's core expertise. As of now, Google only links to Kayak, Expedia, Hotwire and others when you enter the right query into its search engine, but it doesn't display any actual results itself yet.

Our Prediction: Travel is Next

If Google is indeed trying to fill out all of these major niches with a product of its own, we think a travel product is still Google's most likely next move. It is not only the closest to Google's core competency of search, but Google could also easily put ads on there as well.

That time is clearly fast approaching and it makes us wonder: now that this matter is settled, what comes next? We asked a variety of people here and around the web what they thought will define the next frontier, what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs. We got some interesting answers.

For now though, let's acknowledge that there are scores and scores of companies that have considered the pros and cons and decided to launch APIs. Answers to our question about the future ranged from the technical to the social, political and economic. They often fell into a small number of big-picture trains of thought. We hope you'll share your thoughts on the future in comments.

The most interesting replies to the question - "what comes next after APIs become ubiquitous?" can be summarized as follows:

• Business models
• Filtering for information overload
• Standards and interoperability
• Outsourcing API services
• Backlash

Backlash is included in our list because there is definitely some push back. Some folks think APIs are for suckers. We don't agree but those responses were interesting as well.

Business models

Perhaps inspired by a touch of cynicism, many of the people we talked to said that finding business models was the next frontier for an API enabled web.

Nick Gonzales of ad network Social Media said that the early rush to build apps on the Facebook platform should be considered the exception more than the rule. He says it was remarkably easy to build apps on that platform but that hasn't helped developers make money outside of Facebook. It hasn't been the kind of opportunity that many big companies have taken advantage of yet, either.

What he believes may be necessary in order for big money to be made is long term agreements between platforms and developers, assuring continuity of availability and opportunities to monetize.

Gonzales addresses monetization from an ad network perspective, but other business model options include premium access to APIs or - more likely in this author's opinion - APIs leveraged for lead generation.

Filtering for information overload

It's one thing to smash together different streams of data, but making sure the results are user friendly is another matter. Many people we talked to said they wanted APIs and platforms to increase their capacity for determining relevance.

Student entrepreneur Abhishek Nayak put it well when he called for a future characterized by "better platforms like FriendFeed, to make sense of all the information and noise from your social networks." Blogger Eric Eldon of VentureBeat felt similarly when asked what comes next. "FriendFeed will rule," was his three word answer to the question. How incredible is it that such a young startup has gained Twitter-like metaphor power already?

Ian Kennedy of Yahoo's MyBlogLog predicted that filtering and duplication removal will be big. Software consultant Lokkju Brennr got even more specific: "It will have to be actual natural language parsing," he told us, "combine that with all those APIs, and you have knowledge, instead of just data."

All of those are fun things to think about and bring to mind the semantic web technologies we write about here often as well.

Standards and interoperability

The most obvious answer to this question as far as we're concerned is that the next step is to make ubiquitous APIs standards-based and able to work together.

Tech consultant and co-founder of the Yahoo! Developer Network Jeffrey McManus disagreed with the assessment of APIs being truly widespread but said "the next step is to make them not suck and support them well."

Probably the easiest way to do that is to build them on existing standards. Though many of those are still half-baked pipe dreams today, that's not true in every case. See Anil Dash of SixApart, for example, who says that "AtomPub has become the standard for accessing cloud-based data storage."

Florida venture capitalist Dan Rua puts it this way: "after ubiquitous APIs comes category subsystems/adapters, allowing for write once, run with any similar service type abstraction."

One of the most interesting replies we got to our question was from Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch. Aaron says that the next step is for developers to engineer for concurrent processing; to make APIs not just interoperable but intelligently orchestrated to be called in concert. The idea here is to create multi-step or functional mashups. He didn't just come up with that off the top of his head on the floor of the Web 2.0 Expo - it turns out that Mindtouch offers an Open Source framework to accomplish exactly what he's describing as the flavor of the future.

Fulkerson wasn't alone in his hopeful prediction, either, though. Ruby geek Audrey Eschright called for something similar: "Real innovation in the services built on top?" she asked rhetorically. "Not just content mashups, but new kinds of tools."

That sounds great to me.

Outsourcing API services

One of the companies we write about often here is Mashery, a startup that manages APIs for companies who want to offer them but prefer to outsource their management to knowledgeable experts. Mashery reports rapid growth and could represent a key part of the future.

We hear whispers about a number of beyond-stealth startups, too, that are aimed at solving the scalability problems faced by some of the most popular APIs on the web. That's not at all a dry matter - commoditization of solutions to the biggest technical bottlenecks in making APIs work would open up a whole new world of possibilities.

While this may be the most hard-business vision of the next frontier, it's also one of the visions I get most giddy about. Any time I get giddy it's probably a good idea to talk about...

Backlash

Many people we talked to said that the next step was likely to be one going backwards, away from the frothy wave of "Me Too" APIs and platform announcements.

We heard this from some people we really didn't expect it from. David Janes, creator of a sophisticated lifestreaming app for groups called Onaswarm summarized his feelings thusly: "How about a return to using well-known protocols (as opposed to APIs) for doing well-understood tasks, i.e. publishing and posting data. E.g. RSS/MetaweblogAPI or Atom/APP...It's insane...I've had more than my fill of working with these APIs." When I pinged him to confirm those lines - he said that it would more accurately explain how he felt about the APIs he's been working with if there were some obscenities sprinkled into his quote. That from a man who has put his hand into the dragon's mouth. If you will.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Len Kirby, engineering director at Flock. Flock is a social browser that brings together a large number of social data streams and functionality from all around the web. None the less, Kirby is no fanboy of the latest wave of APIs and platforms.

He told us that he thinks the next step in fact may be going back to predictability based on finished standards; as opposed to the half-baked protocols of industry luminaries that didn't finish developing proposed standards. Tempering his vitriol just a touch, this manager at a company built on Mozilla technology also shared some sympathy. "Just like any visionaries there's only so much time to make things real and [for example, coming out of] Mozila and RDF there's been a lot of very good things - but time to market rules." Kirby made sure to affirm as well that Flock really does love Mozilla.

Everyone's got a soft spot for inventors, but a substantial number of people are pushing back on the deafening roar of announcements about new frameworks for invention.

That said, you won't likely hear any of those voices blogging here at ReadWriteWeb! We think that today's crush of APIs and platforms is just the beginning, that we're at a turning point of innovation. We love it and intend to chronicle the next steps as best we can.

Here at the Web 2.0 Expo there's plenty of opportunity to discuss what that future might look like. Internet time traveler Dion Hinchcliffe counted nine major web mashup announcements at the event before lunch today and asked if critical mass had been reached. If that's not true yet, all indications are that it certainly will be soon.