Excellent post, Susan, and Happy New Year! I love your Frustration Canyon and wholeheartedly agree that is the biggest opportunity. The best guides will be those who understand the technology of course, but more importantly who also understand human behavior, humanity’s natural unwillingness to change, and how to show tangible value in changing behaviors.
Nicely done, Susan! Short, to the point, and (judging from the comments and my own reaction) thought provoking. I’d hate to think you are right about blogging being “out” but I do believe bloggers are going to have to “up the ante” and deliver more value in more creative/effective ways.
Analyst two oh? A nice switch-up from the verbiage expert (read expensive) industry watchers use e.g. “MSIE6 compatibility continues to be the benchmark Enterprises use to assess E2.0 opportunities” (um sure, until it’s not!). Making sense of breaking trends has always been important to developing value for your organization and overall technology management / governance.
So, I like most of it. MOSS is collaboration lite at best. It is ripe to be knocked-off, especially if Google can up the quality of its apps. Facebook is just picking up steam (adding 600K users/day http://tinyurl.com/6m5bpq), and I think they are prepping an enterprise version. Also, Twitter is just starting to mature and develop a business model and a secondary industry, so I see it picking up steam. And iPhone will continue to dominate. Form factor is too cool and App store adds too much value for anyone else to compete.
I’m not sure I agree that Facebook is out. I’ve heard plenty of Twitter users say Twitter has supplanted Facebook for them (and I am astounded by how many of my FB/Twitter friends use the Twitter FB app to link their status to their most recent tweet—a totally inappropriate mixing of media in my view), but I continue to see accelerating uptake among my non-technical friends. I know a lot of happy Facebook users who will likely never adapt to Twitter. However, since my Sprint/Motorola Q contract is up in six weeks and I’ll be buying an iPhone then, you’re clearly right about it being out this year. My timing is always impeccable.
Also, as a Twitter user I definitely smell decay on the blogosphere, but I keep coming back to the fact that many of the most interesting tweets tend to contain links. A surprising amount of communication fits inside 140 characters, but all of life doesn’t, and somebody is going to have to be creating the content we discuss. I don’t see blogs’ democratization of content reversing any time soon, so I expect them to stick around as the new old guard of slower, weightier conversation.
