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2007 Forecast: A Finely-Grained, Microformatted Personal Web

One of the nice things about the late-December through early-January period each year is that you see lots of interesting articles and blog posts that summarize the year that just ended and offer forecasts for the coming year. For example, glancing at my "eWeek.com Messaging and Collaboration" RSS feed brings up the following headlines:

"The Biggest Web Trend of 2007 Will Be..."

Over on the Read/WriteWeb site, there is a post titled "The Biggest Web Trend of 2007 Will Be.... This is an initial report of the results of a survey, in which a set of web technology predictions for 2007 was presented in the form of a poll where people were asked to select which trend they believe will be the biggest of 2007.

The preliminary results, or forecasts (after 1235 votes) of which trend will be the biggest of 2007 were as follows:

  1. Online Video / Internet TV: 27%
  2. Continued rise of browser-based apps (Ajax, Google, etc.): 22%
  3. Mobile Web: 15%
  4. RSS and structured data: 12%
  5. Rich Internet Apps (Apollow, WPF, etc.) 9%

It's a bit surprising to me to see RSS that high on the list. I also find it encouraging that many developers are thinking that RSS will be "big" in 2007. To me, RSS is the key to sorting through the megavolumes of information that is available today, and finding the information of interest to each individual.

What about AIM?

Over at the aimInfo blog, Greg has posted "My Most Likely Incorrect Predictions: 2007 Edition".

Among the predictions is that no AOL IM competitor will catch up with AOL's progress in opening up their APIs. That indeed seems like a reasonable forecast. Indeed, there would be no reason to have a dev.aol.com site if AOL was offering just a few simple APIs. But I won't run on about all that right now...

Finely-Grained Personal Web Space Management

Another of Greg's predictions is that:

AIM Pages will continue to get more popular because of the integrated experience with the AIM client, and because it uses open standardsfor 3rd party developers.

This is one that I really hope happens. And I am beginning to think it may. AIM Pages appears to me to be part of a broad movement that I'm seeing in different areas, different projects, companies, etc., where a web page is refashioned almost into a blank writing tablet. Only, you don't have to be a software engineer to work with this tablet. All you need to be able to do is drag and drop icons representing functionality into a specific position on the page, then enter text that configures the item.

I've heard a lot about widgets lately, for example. At the Web 2.0 Summit in November I had breakfast one morning with Tracy Pizzo, the Director of Business Development at widgetbox, "an online directory of web widgets for blogs and other web pages."

A recent Read/WriteWeb post identified the "Top 5 widgets every blogger must have." Another recent post is titled "Mozilla Does Microformats: Firefox 3 as Information Broker".

Of course, AIM Pages, large portions of which can be constructed using ModuleT microformat modules that are applied through a Web-based drag-and-drop user interface, are the epitome of creating and managing ones online presence and presentation, as well as organizing incoming information from the world (through integrating RSS feeds into your AIM Page).

The Economist had an article in its November 25, 2006 issue titled "The universal diarist" about Mena Trott and SixApart (so named because she and her husband's birthdays are six days apart). Their new product is Vox, which was introduced at the Web 2.0 Summit. The key features of Vox are that you can "design it in a flash" (through hundreds of contributed design skins and automated column format selectors), you can "make it rich" through integration of content from your other web properties (such as YouTube, Flickr), and last but not least: you "control your privacy." You can easily integrate diverse source materials into your blog posts, and you can micromanage visibility right down to the level of which visitors can see which items or click which links on a given page.

Products that provide the ability to manage your own online presence and your personal web space at a finely grained level appear to be gaining momentum almost everywhere I look. This, in my opinion, is a very positive trend.

My Forecast for 2007

Actually, I'm so excited about this trend, and I see so much evidence of break-out momentum, that I'll abandon my rule against forecasting and go on record here and now by stating that widgets, microformats, and the capability for finely grained management of personal web spaces are my own personal forecast for being the most important web technology trend for 2007.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

» Submitted by kevinfarnham1 on January 4, 2007 - 12:44am.