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Obligatory 2008 Predictions In Tech

Everyone does a 2008 tech industry prediction post, and why stop the fun when I can join in my own special way?

Twitter != Business

Twitter has raised a few million dollars, mainly to build out their architecture and make sure their numerous outages of yesteryear don’t occur as frequently in the future. Geeky people like Twitter because it’s yet another medium that lets us get on our soapbox and pretend that what we have to say is interesting. Non-geeky people like Twitter… oh wait they don’t. I don’t know anyone who’s not tech-minded who even knows what Twitter is.

Twitter is essentially in the same boat as Meebo with regards to monetization strategy. People are used to IM being free, and perhaps somewhat ad-supported (but nobody clicks on those AIM ads anyway, in fact people go through great hoops to block them from appearing). Twitter is like sending SMS text messages, but they’re published on the web for anyone to see. People are used to paying a few bucks per month for sending SMS messages, but the act of texting has no additional cost. Twitter has already given away the cow in regards to sending messages, as you can send as many as you want for absolutely no charge. If they instituted some paid service levels regarding how many Twits you can post in a month (100 for $5, 250 for $10, etc.) then a lot of people are going to be upset since they’ll be charged for what they got for free before. If Twitter goes the advertising route, they could do Twit-advertising that gets blasted to phones every X messages you receive, but that’s bound to upset people as well who are on a pay-as-you-go SMS messaging plan. The folks behind Twitter may have to revert to simply showing ads on Twitter profile pages, but then you’ll have to deal with the Twitter API users who access 10x more Twitter data than normal web visitors. Ev Williams is a big proponent of creating a solid platform first and letting the business part take care of itself, but in this case I feel like Twitter has potentially tied its hands because all the killer features and uses of Twitter are already completely free.

Apple Stays Strong

Apple is in a position to really do some damage in the smartphone market, and perhaps the entire cell phone industry. The iPhone blows away all other cell phone competitors in terms of customer satisfaction my a ridiculous margin, so that means people are telling their non-Apple-fanatic friends about their good experience. This may not lead everybody to go out and snag iPhones, but if they don’t already have an MP3 player or are looking for a new laptop, Apple is solid in both those areas enough to warrant a second look.

As far as the iPhone is concerned, Apple simply needs to continue to push out quality software upgrades (with major upgrades every 6-8 months, hopefully one of those comes soon) and get people salivating for whatever the iPhone v2.0 is going to look like. If Apple decides to expand the iPhone line, they just need to be careful about hackers who can turn an iPhone Lite into a fully-fledged iPhone with some software upgrades.

Facebook Plateaus

I’ve always said that Facebook has no chance of surpassing MySpace, and my reasoning is that almost everyone who has a Facebook account also has a MySpace page, but not many people who are on MySpace are going to feel like they’re missing something by not also having a Facebook account. Everybody is on MySpace, and a subset of them are on Facebook as well. If you want to reach the most people, it’s MySpace you go to.

Facebook has made some major mistakes this past year in how they roll-out new features. The news feed feature upset a lot of people off, and now the beacon advertising fiasco has betrayed users’ trust once again. MySpace rarely rolls out new features, mainly because I can see them following the formula of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” which is a traditional mindset of a company leading its industry. Small tweaks here and there, a new logged-in homepage, less downtime, faster pageloads, these are all things that MySpace has rolled out successfully in the past few months. What they’re focused on now is business development and ad sales, and they do that extremely well (and have even pioneered some brand new banner sizes.) Facebook’s additions look like they’re thinking too hard in an effort to out-do MySpace, and in an effort to push things out quickly they stumble where it matters. Facebook still doesn’t allow users to customize the look and feel of their pages, nor do they allow you to see people’s profiles if you’re not in the same network or friends with them. Both of these features are the hallmark of MySpace’s user experience, which is a large reason why they are still the king of social networking. If Facebook really wants to compete with MySpace, then they need to give in and allow these features for their users.

37signals Hits “The Enterprise”

Jason Fried has never really been a fan of “enterprise software”, mainly because he thinks it’s crowded and overblown on the user experience’s side. When you combine a few of their products together and look at the featureset, 37signals’ offerings are very close to what companies are paying large amounts for. In a recent post they pondered where company intranets went, but the conversation quickly turned to “what my company uses” and a large percentage of big companies are still using Microsoft Sharepoint for daily collaboration. I could see 37signals building out an integrated suite catering to these corporate users, combining a few of their applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise) along with some new functionality into a mega-package that they could then market to Sharepoint customers at a fraction of the cost. Of course that “fraction” would still be a lot more than they sell to consumers at via web-based versions, so they’d hit a pretty solid niche.