Every new year I try to write down a few things I think might happen over the course of the year as an exercise . While I find that I am pretty good at seeing the broad patterns, I often get the timing wrong so this makes for good practice. This is the first year that I am putting the guesses down on the blog instead of just keeping them to myself though in the spirit of #6 below.

I've broken the six predictions down by category to make partial consumption of this post easier.

Product

1) Apple will finally clue in to the "All of the best electronics under 6lbs" mantra that should have been driving all product strategy for the company for years now. Everybody loves the iPod. Wall Street loves Apple because of the iPod. But I find Apple's real sub-6lb jewel to be their portable computers and not the iPod (even the Nano which I think was truly the product of the year for 2005). The laptop market is the hottest part of the PC market, and Apple laptops are just head and shoulders above the rest. They do power management better, they do wireless better, they do ergonomics better to say nothing about the far superior look-feel-flow of the product overall. I think that the impending switch to Intel is likely to let this little known secret about Apple's other "small" gadget clear and apparent to many dissatisfied VAIO and Lenovo users. If it is true that they have a low cost laptop on the way in January that runs on Intel, watch 2006 as the year Apple cleans up with laptops.

2) Google will make video work on the Internet. I first became aware of the fact that you could do video clips from pretty much any digital camera in 2000. iMovie and MovieMaker make it easy for anyone to edit a movie. And the vast number of Flickr copycats that focus on video clips (Revver, YouTube) show that people have an appetite for producing and consuming video on the Internet. Yet there are still tons of problems, chief among them: the lack of a JPEG equivalent for video (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MJPEGA/B, DiVX, WMV, ??), the lack of adequate bandwidth for uploading/downloading, and most importantly the lack of a proper organizational tool for finding and subscribing to relevant sources of content.

I do not believe that the nascent startups taking the Flickr model to video are going to solve enough of the problems (just the codec stuff alone is more than any of them can handle) but I do think Google can; unlike Yahoo who is more polished and "Hollywood" in their video aspirations, Google is primed to take advantage of the user-generated content wave. They've got the infrastructure, DNA to organize it, and goodwill to create a JPEG of video for Internet distribution. Watch their big "Google Maps" moment in 2006-- I bet it's likely going to be around Voogle.

Business

3) Subscription models on the web are going to become more pervasive. The New York TImes launced NYtimes Select and it's working well for them. People dig Yahoo Music, and iTunes is not far behind with it's version of a subscription model (a mini prediction for 2006). But more importantly, people are paying for services like Flickr Pro, TypePad, and the raft of mini productivity applications like those from 37signals. All of these signs point to the possibility that the web may be emerging from the Ice Age of AdWords into a healthy ecosystem where different business models, and specifically the subscription business model, will work at all levels. After 2006 it will no longer be heresy for small companies to approach potential backers with references to business models that turn on subscription revenue in the same way that today it is no longer wacky to talk about Adwords-like business models for online ventures.

Technical

4) Firefox will be leveraged as a viable platform. The ActiveState guys tried it with Komodo and dev tools a few years ago but it was far too early, and rich IDEs were not a good place to start. But Firefox is here, it's credible, and it's extremely interesting to a whole bunch of alpha geeks that are experimenting with everything from GreaseMonkey scripts to full-on XPI extensions. What Andresen and gang promised with Netscape in 1997, the Mozilla guys may finally have with Firefox 1.5 (all while Microsoft appears asleep at the wheel). Think Flock but more appropriate and less "heavy". I don't know what the first breakout application on top of the Firefox platform will be (P2P file sharing, VOIP, publishing tool, collaborative editor?) but I think we'll see it in 2006.

5) Ruby on Rails loses momentum but dynamic languages thrive. I think RoR is going to get big and hairy this year and start to look a lot more like Zope but it won't matter all that much because it has already done it's job in memeland. Enterprise zealots have woken up (probably not for the first time) to the power of high-level, expressive, late-binding, OO languages like Ruby and Python and the 5-10x productivity boosts that come with using them for small to medium-sized teams. With Guido at Google I think 2006 will be a very good year for Python. And who knows, if Rite (Ruby 2.0) gets done, we may end the year with a number of really compelling dynamic languages (and libraries/frameworks) for stuff to get built with.

The Main Trend

6) The Year of the Casual Publisher. I'm borrowing from Ev's blog post about being a successful web company in the use of the word casual because it fits so well. Over the last two years, all of the people posting to a blog or building a website were painfully aware of the fact that they were in fact "publishing" to the world. There are definitely a large number of people who are interested in doing just this, but as with the proverbial iceberg, there are probably 100-1000x as many folks who in effect "publish" stuff online in a completely unwitting way. Today, this ranges all the way from the occasional forum poster or Amazon book reviewer to the person with 2-3 OFoto albums or 10-20 Flickr pictures. But over the course of this year, I think we will see new services emerge which encourage this type of casual publishing in the same unwitting manner but which centralize the "creative investment" users make in a way that allows folks who would never ever have considered themselves "bloggers" per se to develop a point of presence online.

This last one will have the longest term consequences for how we work, socialize, and generally relate to each other on and off line. In much the same way that I would not hire an engineer today whose blog I couldn't read, whose open source contributions I couldn't see, or whose activity level in an online community I couldn't gauge, I think in 2-4 years people will just not know how to relate to new folks whose online presence they can not visit. From what I understand, this dynamic has already played out on University campuses across the country thanks to Facebook, so it is not too much navel gazing to see it coming for the rest of us.

I for one look forward to an exciting 2006 where I'll get a chance to write more on this coming trend. At the very least, as Alan Kay once supposedly said-- "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." We'll be taking our own crack at this in the coming months and I look forward to writing about it here.