Category Archives: predictions

Less than 3 months

predictions, social networks, tech

Exhibit A:

Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.

 Exhibit B:

The Associated Press reported this afternoon that its reporters were able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

I still think there’s going to be worse lapses than this by the end of 2008.

Why tech predictions are stupid (and a small prediction)

java, predictions, tech

Every year hundreds of tech pundits go and make their predictions for the year – a trend I’m not immune to either. Alan Kay explained the problem with this the best: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. In a field like computing it is so easy for a single person to build something new it makes trying to make predictions a pointless Lose Weight Exercise.

None the less, here’s something that is less of a prediction and more an Lose Weight Exercise in deduction and rumor mongering. Sun is planning to launch a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 in the near future (not sure when exactly, but 2008 for sure). Note that this is different to the existing Sun Grid product (which will presumably continue).

Predictions for 2008

predictions, random, social networks, tech

So it turns out that it’s 2008 and the thing to do is to do predictions for the next year. Here’s my 2:

  1. Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.
  2. Someone will realize that recommendations are the next search. Some company will work out how to do for recommendations what Google did for search: ie, take what is currently an overly commercial medium (eg, Amazon recommendations etc) and turn it into a consumer facing tool which is generally useful. By 2010 what they did will seem obvious, and by 2011 they will be billionaires.

Update – 1 more thing:

OpenSocial will succeed in a big way – not because of support from the big players (Google etc) but because lots of small open source web projects (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc) can easily add support and will finally have a standard way of creating cross-platform compatible software.