Tech Bits for the weekend of 01_04_09

Lots of good bits this week. Since we’ve just entered a new year, there are lots of “2008 Year in Review” articles about, and a similar number of “2009 Predictions” articles too.
Here’s a bit of the best of the rest…

• Top Social Media Sites of 2008. It’s hard to know just what to make of the ComScore figures, but this graph is fascinating:

** Has Facebook really overtaken MySpace that completely?
** Is MySpace really flat at 120K uniques?
** Is Windows Live Space really down about 20% in the past year?



• Web Technology: Impact on Social Media and Community. Social media is really starting to look like a genuine “Web 3.0”, where the generations of Web break down like this:
  • Web 1.0 — I can push a page to you, if you can find me
  • Web 2.0 — You can find me (thanks Google and Yahoo), and I can create applications for you and your friends
  • Web 3.0 — I have content and a community that are interesting, and you can create the applications you like by yourself, mostly without programming.
    

The clearest immediate needs for Web 3.0 are:
    • You need to be able to clearly establish identity — who are you?
    • You want to establish location — where are you?
    • What is your community? 

These things really aren’t complete by any means, and Web 3.0 has now progressed far enough that the communities themselves are creating the applications. That leads to my favorite bit this week:

• The Ubiquity Firefox Plug-in : It Doesn’t Have to be This Way. Ubiquity was released back in August, but with Firefox 3.1 now in its second beta (and FF3 pretty firmly established) there’s ample reason to check this neat plug-in out. By all means watch the Ubiquity video, which gives the use-case of setting a meeting, where you can find the meeting place, map it, and create and send the email with the map embedded, all from within Firefox.

This is really cool, because Ubiquity is easy to use and contains a large number of rich commands that lets users and communities create their own mashups. Now THAT is “Web 3.0”.

Next up: predictions for 2009… (really ... next time)
Happy New Year