I batted around .500 on my themes for 2006; here’s hoping I can do better with my predictions and themes in 07. A few of these are carryovers from last year.
Vertical Search: Google Co-op Custom Search Engines will make this attractive for many new entrants, while regular Google results continue to get worse, due to the spam pages out there.
Web Advertising: The adoption of Ajax will make advertising more complex in 2007. Page Views will no longer be the ultimate measure for advertisers. In addition to Ajax, the use of widgets will often mean the separation of content from its site. I’m sure that the market will come up with better ways to monetize the user experience (and the metrics to support it), but in the near-term it will lead to more confusion among both advertisers and sites.
Further consolidation in the Content Industry: 2007 will bring more M&A in the content industry. I think that there will be a few big names in the mix, with either AOL or Yahoo being acquired (or possibly merging with one another).
There will be a roll-up of blogging tools: With so many users, I’m shocked that bloggers till have to use a non-integrated set of tools for authoring, distributing, searching for and tracking posts. This segment is overdue for a rollup of say, Feedburner, SixApart, MyBlogLog and Technorati. Yes, I predicted this for 2006, so it’s long overdue. Other acquisitions I’d like to see? How about Amazon buying Last.fm, as part of an effort to provide a DRM-free competitor to iTunes?
MySpace usage plummets: The signs are on the wall. First NewsCorp bought them, now Time recognizes them as part of the “Person of the Year” feature. Heck, even your mom has heard of it. That means your kids will soon be dumping their myspace page and moving to the next new thing. Meanwhile, the long-rumored, still-to-be-named consortium-managed YouTube competitor, if it ever launches, will implode almost immediately for the obvious reasons (big egos + conflicting goals + power sharing among unequals = failure). That doesn’t equate to good news for YouTube, however; as media companies pull their content off YouTube, it becomes a home largely for fake porn and video spam.
RSS finally gains adoption: OK, so this one was on the 2006 list as well, but with RSS at the heart of Microsoft Vista and the new Yahoo Mail, the feeds will become ubiquitous even if the name and orange logo does not.
Widgets gain prominence: While many web 2.0 applications were made available as widgets in 2006, most of them were niche tools, such as Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets and standalone widgets such as MyBlogLog. I think that 2007 will be the year that widgets are adopted for brand advertising and application development and go beyond the realm of blog bling. For content providers this creates the opportunity (necessity?) to make your content portable as users continue to move away from centralized portals.
The drop in newspaper readership accelerates: Print circulation will continue to plummet as newspaper companies struggle to redefine their value proposition. While some will continue to see a rise in online readers, it’s not enough to make up for the drop in print revenue. I’d expect to see ongoing M&A in this segment, as private equity firms continue to believe they can drive cost out of the business, but valuations will plummet as compared to 2006.
