This time last year at ReadWriteWeb, I contributed six predictions for 2008 as part of a post that all the contributors participated in.

Recently Silicon Alley Insider called out one of these as one of the best predictions from 2008. Thankfully they choose to focus on other RWW author’s predictions for the other part of their list that focused on the worst. However, they certainly could have pointed to a few of mine.

As Brad Feld recently pointed out this is a pretty much a waste of time - but it’s also something fun and so I’m still going to evaluate my 2008 predictions followed by my predictions (again contributed to ReadWriteWeb) for 2009.

First for 2009 I predicted:

1. Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the ‘one trick pony’ comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they’ll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cause frustration. Plus, they will increasingly be perceived as the ‘evil’ company in many of these new initiatives.

This is actually the prediction SAI really liked and I also must say I feel like this has really proven to be true this year.

2. Closely related, Yahoo’s Hack strategy (see ReadWriteTalk’s podcast with Bradley Horowitz) will start to bear fruit and things will look much more optimistic in Sunnyvale this year.

I couldn’t have been more wrong on this one. That said the people I explicitly and implicitly referenced here have all left Yahoo. I consider watching Y! fall apart over the last year to be one of the great tragedies of they year. Yahoo was a great company that had a great strategy, but seems unwilling to really execute against it making the hard decisions.

3. Facebook will start to feel pressure from two trends that will emerge on the web: distributed social networks and distributed commerce systems. For distributed commerce systems, look to see a first proof of concept from the VRM project. Chris Messina’s diso project with Wordpress will be a great proof of concept for distributed social neworks.

Facebook has definitely felt pressure from both these themes - although certainly more on the distributed social networking theme then the commerce theme. Unfortunately, as I reference in my 2009 predictions they seem to have decided to compete by moving toward closed systems.

4. Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

This certainly didn’t materialize. Interestingly, Richard MacManus (who is infinitely more insightful then I am in this space) actually makes a very similar prediction in our 2009 predictions - so maybe I was just a year early?

We also did have a great conversation about this at The Social Media Ad Summit on the panel I moderated. However, that is certainly not enough to call this an ‘accurate’ prediction

5. There will be a lot of innovation in the hyper-local space, putting the final nail in the newspaper industry’s coffin. This will include companies like Outside.in and Yelp moving toward widespread use and new web properties (from both startups and big Internet Cos) emerging.

This is definitely correct! Outside.in continues to be one of my favorite companies that I have no affiliation with and just closed another venture round and posted some very impressive results for 2008. Also, as evidence of the ‘nail in the newspaper industry’s coffin’ the Tribune Co has filed for bankruptcy! And yes, they are far from the only newspaper company in big trouble.

6. Finally, a 3G iPhone! OK, I don’t know if this is a prediction, but I really really want it to be true

This prediction (and dream) did come true and I absolutely love my 3G iPhone!

Anyway, I feel like I did pretty well with my 2008 predictions. I’d say I was correct with four of my six 2008 predictions.

For 2009, I did the same thing contributing them to ReadWriteWeb with the rest of the list. You can go read everyone’s predictions at RWW, but here are my predictions:

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.

Anyway, yes that probably was a waste of time - but fun anyway. Happy New Year everyone!

[image: Predictions for New Media ala 1974 -- yeah CreativeCommons!]