Fishpool

OpenID is one of the technologies I've been coming across repeatedly in the past year or so, that very much feel like the right kind of response to things that are a constant ache in today's internet. In particular, it's a pain in the butt for a consumer to manage six thousand logins to individual services, and as a result, it's almost as much of a pain for a consumer service (like Habbo) to demand logins; no one really wants to create yet another. I'm pretty convinced that we don't really need to have a database full of passwords, and that we'd be better off without it.

What we need is a way to identify that whoever visited us before and wanted us to call her PrettyGirl87 last week is the same person who wants to be known by this name this week - and we need to know that because our other users might care about a thing like that. We also want to be able to reach the users later, so we'd like to know their email address, or some other means of communication.

Neither of these things actually requires us to ask her to come up with and remember Yet Another Password, if some other means of identifying the user existed. OpenID might be an answer, or at least part of one. So I'm one of many considering whether to support OpenID. I'm also thinking whether we should provide OpenID identity for those users who'd actually like to use Habbo to identify themselves (which would be wonderful for completely different kinds of reasons). But both of those questions really are quite clear: yes, we should. The difficult question is, should we do that instead of something else? Because that's the question that faces anything we might want to implement. And I haven't seen an argument convincing enough to put OpenID on the top of the pile yet. The demand probably isn't going to come from users - but what would be the thing to swing the balance?

In the fine tradition of educated guessing, I thought I'd try to preview what's going to happen, or not, in the Internet world over the next 12 months. Here goes...

Continuing the ten-year tradition of "mobile internet overtakes xxx" punditry that fails to materialize, mobile video and social networking services will not become mainstream in 2007. The mobile 1" experience combined with severely limited input mechanisms just won't replace larger-format mediums. Mobile does have a niche in short-format updates and will gain limited popularity as a snapshot pictures upload vehicle.

Social web technology continues to find popularity in corporate environments, with Wikis replacing traditional document management systems in more and more companies. Consumer-oriented social networking hits peak growth amongst fierce competition in a niche-sites vs mass media battle.

TV companies are forced to accept the fact that Internet video services are able to provide a more relevant experience to their viewers, but few are able to actually deliver a satisfying service. YouTube continues to encroach on their field, despite outcries of copyright violations. By end of the year, DVR's will be marketed by their capability of showing Internet video content on televisions in addition to recording broadcast stuff.

Update: whoa, it seems I was really, really late with my last prediction. Let me qualify that a bit -- I'm not personally going to be satisfied by things like an Apple HTPC able to download stuff from iTunes, Xbox 360 movie downloads from Microsoft, or other such walled-garden solutions. The Sony Bravia thing might be a tiny step closer to what I had in mind, but ultimately I expect someone to provide a box which is not locked to single-vendor content. Something like the Democrazy Player on a TV would fit the bill better. If the Venice Project ends up on a non-PC living room device, that'd be It.

Since I sabotaged this blog a month ago by transfering it to a new platform that totally destroyed all the permalinks and with that my already rather pathetic Google PageRank, I figured this might be a good time to look at changing my editorial policy a bit. Until now, I've sort of avoided talking about work-related matters, which kind of limits the field since practically everything I might want to write about could be construed to be related. So, I figure - why not comment on things? I'm commenting on these things in a more official capacity in more closed circles anyway.

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to introduce a group of IT directors to Web 2.0, which is a fairly thankless task to do in 45 minutes, given that the buzz seems to have no clear boundaries at all, so basically anything whatsoever could be claimed to lay under that moniker. In fact, one definition of Web 2.0 seems to be "whatever the speaker thinks to be cool today". I hope someone in the audience got something out of that.

Anyway - one of the more relevant points in that presentation to myself was that the value of content in this world of syndication, aggregation, user-created content and mashups might not be in the actual content itself, but in the way services are able to provide relevant views into the ocean of it based on the reader's context and preferences. It seems that I'm not alone thinking this - Bear Sterns Media Research has just published an analysis claiming the value being precisely in the packaging of content. An illustration perhaps explains:

The presentation is a useful read if you're interested in the subject, but repeats quite a few basic ideas for anyone who already is familiar with concepts such as the Long Tail etc. Essentially, the analyst (Spencer Wang) is making the prediction that the popularity of user-generated content (or other content coming from outside the traditional Big Media supplies) is going to increase, making it a much more significant fraction, if not the majority of total media consumption. This idea should not be too strange to anyone reading blogs in the first place. Furthermore, because this increases the supply sources dramatically, it's going to be increasingly valuable to consumers to find relevant content, which leads to the success of aggregators and packagers. Once again, much along the lines I'm thinking on as well, although not necessarily with the particular companies he chooses to name in that illustration above.