2009 Predictions Revisited

As promised, I'm coming back to revisit my predictions for 2009 to see how I've done. As predicted by virtue of my fuzziness, I was mostly right on most subjects. Let's go into particulars!

Messaging Breaking Out
I think I did pretty well there. We've still not got a final AMQP 1.0, but just following Twitter and blogs I'm seeing a lot more people, particularly from the non-financial world, starting to use messaging in their applications.

Cloud Becoming Less Buzzy
Complete strike-out here. The same people arguing amongst themselves over what is "cloud" is still going on. That being said, the use of utility computing (as I prefer to call it) is on the rise, and Amazon has come up with so many innovations in the space that it's hard to keep track.

Java Stagnating
Mixed bag on this one I have to say. Java has definitely stagnated, and we still don't have a Java 7. That being said, it looks like the delayed Java 7 may actually give us the chance to see JSR-310 and closures coming into the language, which would be a very positive development.

Java stagnating leads nicely into my next subject (yes, I'm going out of order now):

Non-Traditional Languages Breaking Out
I think I hit this one right on the head. The stagnation of Java, and prominent proponents of systems like Scala and Groovy, are seeing people being more willing than ever to consider these languages the "next Java". Scala in particular has gone from an interesting programming language to one which is seeing mass adoption in enterprises and in web shops.

C# Over-Expanding
To be honest, I have no idea how I did here. I've found myself completely and utterly outside of the C# ecosystem, so I'll have to leave it to one of my faithful readers to fill me in on how I did here.

Social Networking Losing Money
Yep, I failed here. Twitter's probably profitable, Facebook is almost certainly gearing up for an IPO. I was completely wrong here.

But it's not just the social networks themselves, social gaming has gone from an interesting idea to one that makes lots of money, indicating that the space of social networking has started to turn profitable not just for network providers, but also for network ecosystem partners.

Sun Radically Restructuring
I think I can say I was right here, in that they're radically restructuring themselves into Snoracle.

Next year's predictions on the way!

You can has tweets

Now that my tenure at Big Bank B is drawing to a close (more of which anon when I actually have interesting technical bits to discuss), I've joined up with the global hivemind of 160-character inanity that is Twitter.

Although there have been completely unfounded rumors that I've been on Twitter for quite some time, allow me to reassure my devoted audience that these are completely incorrect. Nothing to see there, move along now...

You can find me tweeting as @kirkwy. (why such a strange handle? because every single other short permutation of my name was taken, and a short name gives massive advantage in tweet-for-retweet optimization). And if anybody knows Monty's handle, send it over so that I can stalk him in Twitter as well as the rest of the internet.

My Ideal Social Network

I'm relatively plugged in. I blog (you're soaking in it now!); I have a FriendFeed; I tweet (and those of you who need to know who I am probably already do); I'm on Google Reader; I used to be on Orkut until I started getting befriended by Brazilians I had never met; I'm on LinkedIn (spoiler alert! it discloses who Derivatives Company A and Big Bank B are). I've never gotten onto FaceBook, largely because I've never seen any attraction to it (and if I want to be super-poked, I'd just as soon meet you first, thank you very much).

I don't actually like any of them as a full aggregation basis. I know that FriendFeed is attempting to aggregate everything together, but it's not quite what I need or want.

So all you Web 2.0 guys, here's what I want:

• Subscriber Control: I want to have control over who subscribes to my feeds. In particular, I need to be able to divide my life into at least four categories:
  • Technical Contacts. People who follow me because periodically I write about something someone might find potentially meaningful from a technical perspective.
  • Personal Friends. People who I know personally and might be interested in zoos and what train I got home.
  • Current Coworkers. The main crux here is that there are things that I might want to share with ex-coworkers and personal friends, but not the current ones I have to see every day.
  • Family/Near-Family [1]. These are people who might be interested in stuff going on in my life that I'm not ready to share with other categories.
  Note that nowhere in there is "random gits wot I don't know who want to voyeuristically follow my life." [2] When I do this, I need to be able to either pre-approve a subscriber to a feed, or silently dump a subscriber (see later).
• Publication Buckets: I need to be able to publish any particular item into a bucket, or a whole feed into that bucket.
• Single Republication: I need to be able to take a URL from anywhere (e.g. treat something from Google Reader the same way as something I type directly into a text box) and have it appear to consumers the same way no matter how they choose to subscribe. [3]
• Single Inbox: Sometimes I consume stuff on my phone, sometimes I consume stuff on my laptop, sometimes I consume stuff from Random Web Application. I want "I read this" to mean the same thing on everything.
• Selective Subscribes: I might want to read stuff by Zack Urlocker on MySQL and Sun, but really not care how many miles he ran that day [4]. I should be able to do that, combined with publication buckets.
• API Access: Anything I do with your web app I need to be able to do from any arbitrary app, potentially outside your control.
• Silent Unsubscribes: I need to be able to unsubscribe to someone without them knowing that I've done it. (More on why this is important anon).

Here's the thing about the silent unsubscribe thing. Social Networks largely thrive on number of connections, because that is Very Important to them. That's fine. But I need to be able to structure things in terms of feeds that I follow without feeling like I've given a slight to someone by not re-"friend"ing them (following/friending/whatever), or by dropping them later on. In particular, I may have personal friends who produce drivel I don't have the time or energy to keep up with, but I don't want to slight them by making my personal subscription/publication decisions transparent to them. Fixing this is the heart of the "social" part of networking, and is why eventually every single social network fails as the number of connections grows beyond the desire for humans to have contact to that level.

The core thing here is that this isn't about whether I'm friends with anybody. Many of the people that are my closest friends in the world don't participate in any of this stuff at all. It's about my ability to manage the flow of information in and out of myself that I deem relevant. That's a completely different matter, and the whole focus on "Social" Networks as being about friends and connections is rubbish: it's about my ability to selectively publish and subscribe to categorized feeds that are relevant to my interests at any given point in time.

Someone who can actually do web development should do this [5]. It would rock.

Footnotes

[1]: Note to readers: If I've ever camped out in your house, or you have offspring who refer to me as "Uncle Kirk", you're in here whether I share DNA segments with you or not.
[2]: Seriously, my life isn't actually that interesting. Except that I play with Pumas and Sun Bears and Ocelots and you don't.
[3]: Note that this may mean either compliance on the part of the republishing services (e.g. Google Reader), or it may mean that I have a queue of pending stuff that I have to process before it gets republished; I'm fine with both approaches working together.
[4]: I can say this. M7 Alumni In Da Hizzy!
[5]: Not it. I'm secure enough in my 5k1LLz that I can say that these days, you want me to stay as far the heck away from the browser in a day-to-day coding perspective as possible.

2009 Predictions

Just a quick set of predictions for 2009. I'll revisit nearer the end of the year to see how I've done.

Messaging Breaks Out
Right now asynchronous systems, particularly ones using message oriented middleware, are still pretty fringe. However, even though I disagree with the technology choice, techniques like XMPP are starting to bring asynchronous communications to the masses. I predict that the extension of XMPP, the forthcoming standardization of AMQP, new infrastructure being developed (like RabbitMQ, OpenAMQ, and Qpid), and extension to new programming languages and application execution environments will all drive more and more developers to finally end polling for updates.

Cloud Will Become Less Buzzy
Right now Cloud/Utility computing is really too buzzy to make heads or tails of, and I think it's suffering from that: when you say "Cloud Computing", it means both nothing and anything. I think 2009 will be the year that people start to solidify what works best in a utility computing space versus a local hosted space, and where hosting providers get mature enough and technology becomes mainstream enough that there's an assumption of utility over local hosting.

Java Will Stagnate
I predict that Java 7, if it even hits by the end of the year, will be pretty anemic and, quite frankly, lame. There will be some interesting enhancements to the JVM, but that's pretty much all that's going to be noteworthy.

C# Will Over-Expand
The entire Microsoft ecosystem will expand and grow beyond the ability of typical Microsoft stack developers to keep up. We're already seeing it with WinForms vs. WPF, LINQ vs. ADO.NET Entity Framework, and whole new technologies like WCF. I predict by the end of the year the Microsoft ecosystem has become so bewildering that while leaders in the community push for more change, day-to-day developers push for a halt to just absorb what's been happening.

Non-Traditional VM Languages Will Break Out
Right now most developers in enterprise systems are coding against the "core" languages (C#, VB.Net, Java) against their respective VMs. This reflects in no small part the maturity and power of their underlying runtimes (the CLR and JVM respectively), but the leading edge of the communities have already started to explore other languages that offer concrete advantages (F#, Scala, Groovy) on the tight runtimes that are already available. This will be the year that those actually break out of the leading edge and into mainstream use.

No-One In Social Networking Makes Money
I still think, by the end of 2009, there won't be a player in the social networking space that is cashflow positive, and I don't think it'll be by choice. I think the technology is so disruptive that we still haven't seen the "right way" to monetize it yet.

Sun Radically Restructures
Sun can't keep burning through cash the way they have been, and they can't continue to have such a chaotic story. At some point in 2009, Sun will relatively radically restructure itself in a bid for survival. Hopefully they'll have read my analysis (part 1, part 2). At the very least, they'll change their ticker away from JAVA.

I think you'll note that all my predictions are fuzzy. That's so that in December, 2009 when we revisit them, we can determine that I was partially right on nearly all of them.

SNOS: Quit Angering Andrew Tanenbaum

Recently, someone forwarded me a blog post about a Social Network Operating System and what that might mean. I'll tell you what it means: nothing. Much like the Chewbacca Defense, it doesn't make sense.

An operating system is a system designed to manage low-level hardware resources on behalf of software processes. Let's look at the examples from the original blog post on the evolution of history:

• Unix: An operating system. Huzzah! We've correctly identified one!
  
• J2EE: Not an operating system. Probably not even the right example for this entry, but nevertheless...
• "Something in the browser": Not an operating system. Lest we forget history, Ted Dziuba already told us what we need to know about this subject.

Here's a cheat sheet:


The irony is that what Chris is talking about early in the post is quite a useful thing to have, which is a set of underlying services that will allow people to develop new social applications easily that combine features and data from other social applications. But that's not an Operating System.

It's also not a Relational Database, a B-Tree, a Hash Table, a Compiler, or a Micro-Kernel. All of these things have pretty precise meanings that everybody understands, and the precision facilitates conversation. Let's keep the conversation back on precise terminology. (And inventing your own terminology is fine as well if there's no term that precisely describes your use case [that's how we got Micro-Kernel for example], just don't reuse one).