Web content has typically divided into three camps - those who create, those who react, and those who just watch. The lurkers, if you will. From the very earliest days of blogging, those first posts awaited the inevitable comments, and, given a clear revenue stream, you would see early participants like Fred Wilson say that "comments are how bloggers get paid."

[Source: https://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-real-value-of-social-media-interaction/#comment-2531]

The earliest engagements we had with people who read our site gave us incredible discussions, and spawned more posts and even, in rare cases, changed minds. Sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and others became known for their diverse threads, and those in the comments are why you showed up.

But we've also seen the pendulum swing the other way. Everybody knows to "never read the comments" on popular news sites, as the most aggressive vitriol and ignorance floats to the top. YouTube comments have long been notorious for their lack of quality (though I feel this has improved of late). And Twitter, for many who should be able to use the platform, their every move can attract trolls who have a vendetta to take them down - but somehow don't get banned.

As social media sites eclipsed the momentum of blogs, conversations moved. We adapted by integrating social discussions from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter and appended them to our blogs. We would all share our posts on social, and then engage where the content landed. The best bloggers would find their readers wherever they were. But others simply turned comments off. Maybe it is because they were full of spam (they were) or the quality wasn't there (often true), but also, because the total quantity declined.

Let's go back to talking about Twitter. Twitter drives me nuts because it's fantastic and so poor at so many things. They seriously have real-time on lockdown. There is no better place to see what is happening right now. If there's a calamity, search Twitter. A breaking news event? Search Twitter. A sporting event? Twitter.

But Twitter has this awful habit of giving all users an equal voice. Now hear me out what I mean.

If you tweet publicly, anybody who you haven't blocked can reply, and their content is appended to your tweet. It follows you around. If a Republican politician posts, left-leaning posters race to take down their message, while the MAGA crowds prop it up and try to gain eyeballs. If the Kardashians say something, the crowds pounce on the valuable real estate quickly to show their adoration or pimp whatever link they've got going.

And down the publicity food chain, if you're a woman, especially a visible one, you get awful men saying foolish things. I guarantee it. They may call you names or question your ability. You block one and ten more pop up. If you're black, or Jewish, the racists will find you. They all know how to tweet.

So what I recommend above all other Twitter changes is the ability for people to reclaim their space. Hillary and Trump should both be able to post information without the crowd's replies being appended. Just like blogs and YouTube stars can turn comments off, Twitter users should be able to as well. The thing about social networks (and most products, to be honest) is that you should give the users control. But they haven't done it, and I think it delivers a great disservice to the platform, which has become a hotbed of harassment and hate - as Reddit and others have too.

If you can trust your commenters enough to give them a voice, by all means, amplify their voices. But when they have shown you time and again that they cannot be trusted, turn it off.

At the beginning of last year, as the Trump presidency sickeningly took hold, I worried his mere presence and daily volleys against what most of us thought to be good and proper, right and just, would dominate our every thought and conversation. His long shadow of darkness constantly loomed against any chance of progress and invention - taking the luster off usual excitement, demanding an unrelenting distraction, and regular dread.

I pushed pause on the blog because I felt like my comments on the day to day in Silicon Valley carried less weight in a world of crisis, as politics overwhelmed the usual storylines. But I realize silence is not the answer. Instead, we should ask more of ourselves when the wind is not at our back, but against us.

So what if we can make cars to drive themselves, only to find our streets hit by long-range missiles? So what if we could make it easier to connect people together on the Internet, all while seeing people turned away at the entrances to our countries, and see laws enacted that pitted people against each other in ways that we found abhorrently racist fifty years ago? So what if somebody could sprinkle some magical Internet dust on cryptocurrency and make a handful of desk jockeys rich (on paper), when trillions of real world dollars were being extracted out of the lower 90 percent of earners from an egregiously unequal tax bill jammed through congress, with chicken scratches in the margins?

It all seems pretty foolish sometimes, as we banter about over variations in cost per click on banner ads when retail supermarkets are going out of business and laying people off. It seems ridiculous that customers can debate the benefits of the latest food delivery startup when US senators openly debate eliminating food stamps for those who need them. And you can't get all that excited about meal replacements like Soylent and the highest tech juice squeezers in all the land when there are people just miles from the most valuable companies in the world who can't afford to both live and eat.

Remember "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy?" Well, not only is the guy telling that story now tainted with his own awful reality, but not only is nobody truly happy, but there's a lot of crap that isn't amazing.

Nearly 60 percent of children in the city of East Palo Alto, buttressing Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park are homeless, victims of skyrocketing housing prices. Families have stuffed themselves into RVs, only to be told to move along, in Mountain View and Palo Alto, home to $3 million average home prices, bordering Google and Stanford. And yet, the big tech companies keep hiring, while Bay Area cities don't even come close to keeping up with the housing demand.

The Uncloaking of the Alt Right and the Me Too Phenomenon

As for those tech workers who have managed to find a way to live here? 2017 was a mess. Along with an emboldened racist and sexist wing in the Valley, with a new hero in the White House, and a self-promoting ex-Google engineer having penned a hateful screed that cast doubt to his colleagues' abilities solely due to their gender at birth, we also managed to get pummeled by regular news alerts to who the latest scumbags were who mistreated women and thought they could forever get away with it.

What a disaster to see people I considered friends in years past - like Robert Scoble and Dave McClure, to find some of their seedy behavior exposed to the world, and know that's just the tip of the iceberg, as others who have made sport of inappropriate behavior a practical part-time job are legion. While I am very glad to see that it seems, finally, women are being believed, and men are admitting they screwed up, it will take generations to see our workplaces truly be welcoming places for everyone - if it is ever to be.

(Time out: What a f---ing disaster Robert's non-apology post turned out to be. I was stunned at how bad it was, when the easiest thing to do would be to admit guilt, admit to being an ass and promise to work on making things right. I was horrified when I saw it...)

Bitcoin - A Bet or a Con?

So what did our best and brightest minds tend themselves to, instead of taking on hard work and pushing back on the vacuous fact deniers running the place? Many of them took to gambling their life savings on shiny internet tokens and watching prices rise like addicted penny stock chasers - making their own lingo, and debating the basis of specific coins, as if there were any real value in it - besides to get rich, and quick! Thanks for nothing, crypto nerds.

I'm old enough to remember the first dot com boom, with its own fake money games - Beenz and Flooz, that made up their own online currencies, only to go bankrupt at the first sign of weakness. At risk of being the last person on the crypto train, spare me the spam messages and emails and tweets, and please, get back to work. There are too many things you could have done with your time that helped the world, like we are supposed to do.

I apologize for my irregular notes here. When the Valley is really humming, and working on important tools and exciting ways to help us all learn, communicate and share, that's exciting. I see those flashes of brilliance, where I am, at Google, more than I tell you. But I worry many of the trends we've seen that reward bad behavior have become so entrenched, that the real value is being absorbed by the funders and the funded, more than the users. We have to share or the backlash will be stronger than we've already seen.

The Web always promised to bring people together. But just as simply, it can drive people apart, as geographical barriers or partial or full anonymity empowers people to say things or behave in ways they wouldn't in a direct setting.

Accelerated by the new reality of realtime streams where everyone has a megaphone and seemingly everyone is working to "go viral" and make the biggest noise leads to a constant cacophony of shouting on the issues of the day. And of late, as I outlined in my last post about Trump's looming $100 billion productivity crisis, just about every stream and news source is dominated by politics and the impact to people by political decisions.

For those opposed to the Trump team's way of thinking, the daily barrage of news and rumors can be fatiguing. Each morning can bring new horrors of gut-churning policy and more needing to escalate to fight back. This weekend's sparked crisis stemming from an ill thought out and very likely racist and illegal refugee travel ban saw rallies across the country and millions of dollars raised to flow into the coffers of charities aiming to help, like the ACLU. (I too donated, and my company has promised to set aside millions to help.)


As colleague Yonatan Zunger warns (and you absolutely must read his post), we will likely hit a wall of outrage fatigue. If there is a steady stream of controversial news that impacts us, or people we know, or people we are tangentially fond of, we will run into capacity limits to be angry and to be heard, as the calamities run into each other. But even if that occurs, that doesn't mean we can act as if nothing is happening at all.

I've already seen people yearn for the good old days when we could debate data portability, site aggregation, text editors, or even which mobile OS is the best. But at a time when people's lives are at risk, and foundations we expected to be stable are proving themselves unstable, having a row about the latest geek gadget seems out of place.

It's not that we didn't see this coming. Back in 2006, an ancient eleven years ago, I knew we would see the web accelerate people's disagreements. People want to flock to their tribes, where others agree with them, and the opposite side can seem evil, foolish or subhuman. Most of the time, they're not - even as their words are alarming and frightful. We knew when people had an opportunity to polarize one another and their beliefs, they would. And every study shows this - including our unprecedented divisions in government, globally, nationally and locally.

We can use the Web to rally together and raise funds and awareness for our causes, and we will. But while I'm excited to see the deep pocketed among us excitedly match donations, a great chunk of society is living paycheck to paycheck, and the access to discretionary funds to hold back the government, an institution that is designed to help them, is simply going to run out.

Until we reach some level of stability and understanding with one another, and are out of a crisis mode, you can expect the 'all politics all the time' streams to continue. Mild apologies.

Each year, American businesses are confronted with estimates that upwards of $2 to $4 billion in worker productivity is lost thanks to employee office pools around March Madness, the month-long college basketball championship tournament. Conventional wisdom has it that the tens of millions of players may physically check in to the office, but mentally are somewhere else, working at half speed, sapping dollars from their employer.

That single digit billion dollar gap is trivial compared to what the country has likely already seen after a year-long torture test of a presidential campaign, followed up with the looming tenure led by a person whose unpredictability and lack of respect for historical precedent, combined with a filter-free ability to share his half-formed thoughts with the world has everyone guessing what headline will flare up next.

The fidgety and distracted half-attentive employees in corner cubicles who may have been pulling for upset picks to win their bracket are instead replaced by entire teams of workers who are on edge - possibly unsure whether their place in the world is safe, whether their rights are going to be protected as new leaders rewrite and repeal the laws, or simply numb and horrified from the scandal of the day. And, if the 2016 campaign and post-election news cycles have been any hint as to what's to come over the next few years, this feeling, resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, will be felt in some capacity for a large percentage of the population for some time.

Don't you want to watch something else?" -- South Park

If it's at all possible to act as if politics were not part of this discussion, leaving aside my strong support for Hillary and revulsion to Trump... putting aside the real life-threatening possibility that he and his team will ignite wars, stir up hatred against people who don't match his criteria of perfection, and the domino effects of reducing health care for millions and denying environmental impacts that threaten the very world... the very spectacle of distraction alone will seep in its darkness, sapping morale and focus.

The volume of noise and conflict around Trump is unprecedented in a connected age, when everyone can consume and share information instantly. And while Twitter has had its challenges, it has become the epicenter for the latest volley of noise from the president elect. Buzzfeed recently said noise around Trump had crested 10 times higher than the previous first family of the network -- the Kardashians.

At this point, even logging in to a social network, be it Facebook, Twitter or any other, runs into the possibility someone is talking about who Trump might be or what he might do. The campaign even brought the debate of whether you could trust news sources to the fore. The entire Web is infested.


Conversations among friends, neighbors, and colleagues either tiptoe around the election or confront it head on, but it's always there, in the way the tragedy of 9/11 was on everyone's mind for the months and years following the attacks. It's a distraction not just for a few hoops jockeys or degenerates, but for tens to hundreds of millions of people, and won't just last a month, but, most likely, for years.

Maybe this administration isn't going to be as alarming and disruptive as we all predict. Possibly after we all look at this like passing a smoldering wreck on the freeway, we can continue forward, but the rhetoric and policies promised to hit us seemingly have us positioned for a half decade of PTSD, which will impact everyone. This madness won't end with a buzzer beater from Gonzaga.

Disclosures: I work at Google, a perceived partner and occasional competitor to Twitter, which I use constantly. I was also more than happy to donate to Hillary's 2016 campaign.

+Markos Moulitsas and the +Daily Kos crew are enjoying the ongoing GOP primary battles so much that they are encouraging Democrats to crash upcoming open Republican primaries and caucuses, casting their vote for +Rick Santorum, all in the name of extending the increasingly close race with +Mitt Romney, which could make +Barack Obama's chances of reelection greater in the long run - assuming money and ill-will is thrown at the contest before the GOP convention later this year.

I tend to doubt whether this "Operation Hilarity" could have real impact on the outcome in close states, but 2012 has already seen some razor-thin margins and a few hundred votes here or there could be game changing. It's time to get some popcorn and watch this play out if you love the political horse race.

See: DailyKos.com: Announcing Operation Hilarity

/via My Google+ Profile.

In the social Web, we talk a lot about being transparent and open. But many of us are limiting what we say online to a specific topic. We’re sharing links and associating with people who share our viewpoints, and possibly avoiding hot-buttons like politics, in favor of talking about technology and tools. Is this the right thing to do, or have we gone too far in terms of being willing to share who we really are?

After a rare political post for him this week, titled "I am pro life", Chris Saad noticed a hesitancy for people to share his content. I said this was because the topic was out of line for what people expected from him, and each of us plays a specific role in each of the networks where we participate. This fell in line with my post Saturday on disaggregation and focusing content for each network. We would absolutely appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen in below:

Although there is a full month left before the calendar flips to 2010, candidates for next year's gubernatorial candidacy in California are already lining up to take the state's top spot when Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office. Among them is Silicon Valley notable Meg Whitman, whose years at the helm of eBay are being made the centerpiece for much of her promotional advertising, including radio spots and a good part of her online presence. Early polls have her tied with repeat runner Jerry Brown at 41% in a hypothetical matchup. But as great a story as eBay has been, the company's focus just lends itself to creative opponents and speechwriters.

Start with the tagline... Will Meg Put Your Children's Future Up for Auction?

Of course, replacing "your children's future" with "your business" or "your home" or whatever your favorite buzzword is still works.

And don't forget what auctions are all about... Selling out to the Highest Bidder. Without saying I think Meg is any better or any worse than Brown, in a world of politics where lobbyists are frowned upon and outside influence is distrusted, one could spin Meg's approach to politics or issues as doing just that.

After all, can't you just name a "Buy It Now" price at eBay? What is the price for a politician?

Whitman's bio, an impressive record including her education at Princeton and a Harvard MBA, floats through her work with Bain & Co., Stride Rite, Procter and Gamble, FTD, Hasbro and Disney - talking about her taking what ended up bring a dream job, when she joined eBay in 1998, and delivered an "unparalleled business success story", saying she "revolutionized the way goods are bought, sold and paid-for on line."

There is no question eBay changed the game online - managing to fight off competition from Amazon, Yahoo! and others - an unquestioned success. But if I were in politics, I would highlight the fact that eBay is the place to take old junk you don't want any more, or a place to find last year's models today. Meg Whitman's audio ads are talking about "change", just like every other politician talks about change to elicit voter interest, even as eBay's current campaign says things like "This season's shows still look great on last season's HD TV."

While it's easy to anticipate GOP opposition targeting Brown, who served from 1975-83 in the role of governor, as recycling old ideas, being tied so much to a company that champions this very thing doesn't exactly put Whitman in the driver's seat in terms of next generation forward-looking thinking.

Additionally, during Whitman's tenure at eBay, at 2005, the company very visibly purchased Skype for $3.1 billion. While the company also purchased PayPal on her watch, which has been a fantastic success, the majority of Skype was sold from eBay earlier this year, with a valuation well under that mark, after the deal never really made sense after years of stalling. Brown and other opponents' handlers could see the Skype buy as a costly billion dollar gamble that distracted eBay from its core business. With California being in such budget peril these days, it's a story that almost writes itself.

Regardless of your political leanings, it is clear these kinds of comparisons are going to come up. And lest you think we have moved on in politics away from soundbites and taglines, we haven't. If Whitman becomes the GOP candidate, or a front-runner, eBay could be as much a hindrance as it ever was a benefit. Her opponents should be dreaming of fun taglines, and her team should be getting ready to respond when they do.

This evening, around 8:25 p.m. Pacific Time, pop star Britney Spears passed President Barack Obama for the most popular Twitter account representing an individual (Both trail CNN Breaking News). While Spears joined Twitter relatively recently, only 6 months ago, to Obama's more than two years ago, the diva and those who help manage her online presence have shot to the top of the rankings, as Twitter has moved out of the geek sphere and into the mainstream. Not surprisingly, she and Obama are trailed by other "real world" celebrities like Ashton Kutcher (#4 overall), Jimmy Fallon (#6) and Shaquille O'Neal (#7).


As of 8:25 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday, @britneyspears topped @barackobama.
Both Spears and Obama have more than 620,000 followers as of tonight, following Britney's passing of Barack.

Note: Previous reports from sites like WeFollow, TwitterHolic and TwitterCounter were incorrect, as Obama's following statistics were undercounted by almost 50,000, stuck at 571,885 for some reason. (See some premature notes of Spears passing Obama on Twitter Search and a tweet by someecards to that effect.)


@someecards was premature, but on target.
Earlier this week, sparked by a New York Times story, Spears' account, as well as others, were highlighted as being operated by "ghost writers" - sparking outrage from some corners of the Web who thought they were authentic. Guy Kawasaki, who admitted to letting others tweet on his behalf, said he managed all direct messages and replies, while others were able to post links. But Spears' account was never really a secret - offering some transparency to the process. In December, you can recall an interview by Jesse Stay with Lauren Kozak, her social media director, that discussed how the account operated.

As she said then:

"Yes, we do get Twitters directly from Britney. We also get Twitters directly from Britney's Entourage. We provide announcement and tour information. We also have messages which are designed to drive traffic around Britney Spears' properties when we have something cool go on."

Ghost writers or not, the account has gained significant visibility and popularity - despite only adding a tweet about once a day. Of course, in contrast, Obama has only posted an update once since his swearing in on January 20th.

As Twitter grows, you can see the growth in the pair's audiences. Refreshing either's page will show a few dozen followers joining each minute, though Britney is increasing hers at a more dramatic rate.

The Spears and Obama teams operate differently when it comes to Twitter, not just in terms of frequency of their updates, but in how they follow back. Obama's account follows more than half a million, with 60,000 or so not being followed, for whatever reason. Spears' account, in comparison, follows fewer than 80,000. Of course, it doesn't exactly seem possible that either user, or their handlers, is really paying attention to the updates from fans - as the numbers are astronomical, and they probably have other priorities.

It's not clear if Britney can maintain the top spot for long. Kutcher joined Twitter in January, and his account is rapidly gaining, showing more than 583,000 followers as of 7:30 Pacific time this evening. At the current pace, it may be he, and not Britney, who tops the followers chart.


Ashton is Looking to Pass Britney Soon
Oh... and for the record, I don't follow any of these accounts, so my own data did not contribute.

Even as many voters sat on pins and needles, the 2008 presidential election was among the easiest to predict, according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, whose site skyrocketed to stardom amid high visibility throughout the primary and general election season last year, as he took a thorough background in statistical analysis and focused on the world of politics, hoping to improve the accuracy of polls and predictive analysis. In his comments on a keynote at the SXSW Interactive conference today, he said media outlets relied too much on most recent news, and could improve their prognoses if they instead turned to historical statistics and trend data.

Nate said he started FiveThirtyEight.com "out of frustration" with the traditional media properties, including CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. He said their coverage "wasn't empirically valid and correct," adding, "polls were too much of the narrative and they were taken too seriously as they were poorly conducted and interpreted."

Armed with a history of crunching baseball statistics to predict how well players would perform in the future from his time with the Baseball Prospectus, Nate tried to spot irregularities in polling or find variables that indicated how voters in each state were likely to trend which most pollsters were missing. One example included how in the Appalachian region, voters who declined to state their ethnicity, choosing to instead be labeled as "American", were doing so as a badge of pride, but also indicated a level of "redneckness," as he put it.

Like with baseball, Nate called the political process a long season, where largest trends were not swayed by an individual game's data, or by a single primary.

"You don't get that much information at once. A puzzle gets solved a little at a time," Nate said. "People are trained to over-react to these kinds of things, and I would urge patience."

Having successfully predicted the 2008 elections more accurately than practically anybody else out there, Nate is now being courted to try and solve a wide array of other issues, ranging from predicting the Academy Awards (which was partially successful), to predicting economics. As could be expected, he was asked to provide his thoughts on the economic slowdown that has effected everyone, and how long it would be until potential voters started to blame the Obama administration, instead of the Bush administration.

"We haven't had a situation like this in the modern era," Nate said. "People are really scared, and they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have people who are very pessimistic about the future of the country, but Obama has great approval ratings. Usually that doesn't happen. There is a kind of grace period of three to six months, and after this grace period, of about 18 months, people assign him as much blame as they would Bush for the economy, so he needs the economy to turn around sooner, rather than later."

But even armed with as much data and talent as he has, Nate recognizes that other factors are in play. Baseball players can get injured, and "you can only expect a human to do what they do what they were doing so many times," he said, adding, "in baseball, everything in the last 100 years is 99.9% accurate. The real world is not like that."

Speaking of not predicting the real world, the term FiveThirtyEight, which refers to the number of electoral votes available in a presidential election, may need to change, should Washington DC gain representation in Congress, throwing all the numbers off. Should that happen, Nate just may have to change his URL.

Today was a big deal. While much of the tech blogosphere has covered, in full, Barack Obama's inauguration through the eyes of how technology played a role, from CNN integrating Facebook in its site, to different streaming services, including Ustream, the biggest developments will of course have very little to do with how quickly data moved across the network, or how quickly you got the news and distributed it. History isn't likely to look back on January 20, 2009, and mention the changes at whitehouse.gov, including the addition of a blog and RSS. That's all very cool, but it will all pale in comparison if the next one thousand four hundred and sixty one days don't roll out quite so smoothly - and there is a ton of work to do.

While I was on a conference call this morning when Barack Obama took the oath of office, I have since come home and watch the proceedings on television, thanks to TiVo. While I wasn't a starry-eyed Obamamaniac, there's no question I am glad he won. Without recapping the last eight years, it's clear there is a ton of cleaning up to do. And just thinking about where to start is daunting.

One can practically wax reminiscent over the time with foolish social issues were what occupied our thoughts when it came to the presidency, or what party to support. Gone are the times when you would wonder about who tossed their Medals of Freedom, or who inhaled, or whether somebody was a "wimp".

Instead, as we all know, Obama has started his first day as commander in chief with an incredible to do list. He is faced with a practically unprecedented situation, flanked by economic and social struggles domestically, and strife internationally. And while people from all parties know things have to get better, there is absolutely no sure answer. There are parts of this world, and large groups of people who hate who we are - not just because of the actions of the last administration, but due to differences that are possibly borne from centuries of frustration and resentment. Compounded with the aggressive tone of conflict that has been our foreign policy of late, and the anger is undoubtedly stirred.

What Obama has done to achieve his position as the President of the United States is incredible - and something I did not foresee coming. When I first talked on this blog about the 2008 election, I barely mentioned his name, talking instead about Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and potentially, Al Gore. But through an extremely coordinated campaign, and messages that struck home with many Americans, he led early in the primary campaign against Clinton, and never turned back. And while I voted for Hillary in the primary, I certainly was not voting against Obama - and as I'd once said about Hillary, the more I eventually learned about Obama, the more I grew to like him. Voting in November, for me, was very easy.

But even amidst the excitement, and the high hopes, I worry.

I worry not because of his potential, or his capabilities, or his record. I think he is very skilled. But I worry due to expectations and the short attention span of the American people who do not often have patience when it comes to policy. There will be no quick fix to our economic struggles. There is no clear end in sight for the Middle East struggles that have gone on as long as records have been kept. And you can't just hit "Control-Z" and undo many of the things that cemented people's opinions against the Bush administration. You can't just look at Guantanamo, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan and see the process unfolding smoothly, no matter your partisanship. And as has always been the case, simple "hope" and expectation of "change" will not be enough. It will take a ton of work. It will take patience, sacrifice, and cooperation, often between people who don't happen to like each other very much.

Over the next one thousand, four hundred and sixty one days, there will be scandals, both real and artificial. There will be surprises. There will be excitement and frustrations. There will be great speeches and boring ones. And if you think about it, theoretically, Obama and his team would have to royally screw things up to not have the American people say, in November 2012, that they will be better off than they are today, giving them a running start at reelection already. But anyone who thinks this is going to be a piece of cake is kidding themselves. Even as Obama spoke today, and gave a speech many are fawning over, the stock market fell. Even as many cheered in Washington DC, others were notified they were losing their jobs. And the wars around the world didn't take a time out.

This will be a very long process. I'm hopeful. I'm relieved that this first part of change has taken place. But this will be a long journey we will all be watching and be part of, as we experience the start of something very new. The whole world is watching.

Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech and the recent results: My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

In the mid and late 1990s, there was a land rush for domain names, as every company jumped in and procured Web addresses and built out Web sites to establish their electronic home. Although many of these sites were rudimentary at best, they knew they needed to be there to participate. In 2009, it will be expected that brands and businesses will be similarly established on social media, using tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

While Steve Jobs is not likely in imminent danger, the continued unsettled rumors, as well as a good level of common sense will push Apple to present a succession plan for Jobs, which will not take place immediately, but over the space of a few years. One to three names of potential in-house replacements will be named, as well as a timeline, as Steve fades to the background, but continues to wield tremendous power over Apple's vision and deliverables.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Mike Arrington's tech blog continues to be the influence leader in its space. Both VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider have forged strong brands with a financial bent which would be good additions for the TechCrunch brand as Arrington and team look to extend their umbrella and wrap up what he considers to be the best blogs. SAI in particular would offer an East Coast/financial bent that the Silicon Valley-based TechCrunch is currently not known for.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

While commoditized PCs managed to put pressure on Macintosh and relegate Apple to a small market share percentage the Cupertino company is still trying to recover from back in the 1980s, history will not repeat itself, as Google's Android partners will be unable to knock the iPhone off its perch as the must-have smart phone for power Web consumers. BlackBerry will continue having a significant share in the enterprise, but it will continue to be iPhone eroding its share, not the Android, especially given the unmatched array of applications available for the iPhone which Android will not be able to match.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Google's mismanagement of FeedBurner has many people frustrated with how the feed service has been run since its acquisition last year, as the service continues to see slowness, outages, and recently went dark, shutting down their blog and being gobbled up by the AdSense team. Competitors will emerge, enabling bloggers to move their FeedBurner subscriber base and historical statistics to their new platform.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Despite Twitter's recent dance with Facebook, it will rely on its existing venture capital funding and find revenue that enables the company to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. FriendFeed, similarly, will not be acquired or merge with any other service prior to the end of 2009. The company, if necessary, will instead do a second round of funding, with its own internal sources providing much of the capital.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

The layoff parade in 2009 will not be limited to unprofitable companies, small companies or practically any category of companies. The doom and gloom that have hit the financial markets, advertising, real estate and almost every sector will continue through the first half of the year, before starting to see a rebound in the third quarter. You will see strong companies like Microsoft lay off thousands, and practically everyone will not be renewing contract positions that have concluded - even Google and Apple.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

America's political climate is extremely polarized, following the conclusion of two extremely divisive terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last year too). Digg, losing momentum, will sell cheap. Yahoo! will eventually be purchased by News Corporation, AOL, or even Google, assuming it passes regulatory approval, by the end of the year. Microsoft, still insulted, won't be back to the table.

Google's annual year-end zeitgeist gives us a picture of what the United States, and the world at large, was searching for in the past 12 months. This year, Google, in a first for the global search engine, broke out their search results among 30 separate countries, but here at home, there was one individual who clearly had people looking for more: McCain's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Palin's plucking from relative obscurity and continued oddities throughout the campaign following the Republican National Convention kept her atop Google's lists in almost every category. Even her being an attractive woman, to many, kept her atop the image search zeitgeist, a claim that none of her counterparts could manage.

The 2008 results (found here) show "palin" as the #7 overall fastest rising term in the US, "Sarah palin" as the #1 fastest rising term in Google News domestically, and also #1 fastest rising in Image Search. You would think that with all that searching, the GOP would have vetted her a bit more before the election, but that of course is a different story.


In fact, in a year when we had the 2008 Beijing olympics, the election of Barack Obama, a financial crisis, and a stock market meltdown, Mrs. Palin was the fastest rising in all the world. (See the global results)

Following Palin's selection as VP candidate just prior to the Republican convention, searches for her outweighted those for Obama, her running mate, McCain, and Joe Biden, the opposing VP candidate. In fact, it wasn't until October when the eventual presidential pick overtook her on the site. (See the politics page)

Outside of politics, Google shows also that Facebook outpulled MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and LinkedIn in terms of social networking interest, and that hybrid car interest peaked when gas was $4 a gallon, and fell by fall as prices dropped by half. (See: Trendsetters)

The full report is here.