I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, but suddenly I’ve been reconnected to a whole bunch of old friends from high school, university, even summer camp, all thanks to Facebook. Some of these people I’d completely forgotten about, some I still can’t remember (!) and some I’d thought about every couple years and even googled, with no results.

This has created a really odd and somewhat unnerving phenomenon for me. People I considered a distant memory now tell me about their daily minutia. Friends from different parts of my life mix together in a schizophrenic cocktail party filled with small talk. Memories long forgotten are resurfacing.

To me this is interesting because it represents a generational turning point. My generation is reconnecting in a way previous generations never experienced. Long lost friends and acquaintances are reuniting from across the years and across the world.

Meanwhile, the current generation were ‘born connected’. They will always be connected, they can never lose touch. Is it a burden to carry around all that baggage? In different phases of my life I’ve had the chance to discover different aspects of my personality and form very different relationships. I wonder how that works when all the people you have ever known are observing and commenting on your every step?!

If George can anoint himself “The Decider” then I can confidently take the title of “The Predictor”. I was just crowned (literally, I have the tiara to prove it) 2008 Visionary Of The Year by Unlimited Potential. Which is pretty impressive, considering it happened in the first month of 2008.

It was another fun event and my fellow predictors had plenty of prescient and witty insights. Hopefully UP will post all the predictions somewhere.

The following is my outlook on the year to come. It contains a fair dose of wishful thinking, but sometimes technology and events do sneak up on you quicker than you expect.

2007 Greatest hits and misses

DRM finally goes away
Hit. Woot!

Wellington weather will be shit
Miss. Woot!

2007 Report card

User generated video advertising
Good progress: LiveRail, BrightRoll, YuMe, Adap.tv, VideoEgg, Adotube, Google/YouTube

Enterprise SaaS
Good progress: Netsuite IPO, Force.com

Web OS
Good progress: Macbook Air, gOS, CloudBook

Mobile Media Centers
Not so much: iPhone + Apple TV

2008 Better mobile experiences

3G iPhone with GPS, still won’t be available in NZ

Mesh networks start catching on thanks to Wireless USB (WUSB)

Somebody will provide a standard wifi billing platform (think OpenID + Paypal)

Presence detection gets real, gets fun:
get pinged when social network in proximity,
“scan” a party, cafe, club, biz conference to see profiles,
mixing and mingling privately while standing in a crowded room

2008 Hyperlocal on the homefront

Oil nears $200 a barrel, travel increasingly becomes a luxury,
people start thinking and acting a lot more local

Biofuels start becoming more efficient, demand surges
Aqua Flow becomes a leading provider

Working and learning from home becomes more and more of a necessity, collaborative web applications thrive in response

Lending networks thrive, microloans help ease economic turbulence

Home bio scanners start to hit the market – letting people scan food, detect viruses and germs, capture and analyse medical data, send data to a remote expert for further analysis

2008 Geeks Robots rule the earth

Portions of Google Earth and Streetside become available as realtime video

Mashed on top of this “open surveilance” framework will be
massively multiplayer game experiences

Hardware widgets and software widgets will converge producing very hackable, very personalised, interoperable device components (Buglabs, ThingM, Chumby)

New software driven materials interactively, physically reshape on command

2008 will go down in history as the year the robot uprising started taking shape

2008 Politics

Obama wins by a landslide

Helen wins (barely)

Kerry resigns in disgrace over conflicts-of-interest scandal

Tom Beard becomes the new mayor!

Finally, in my acceptance speech I predicted that next year the panel will include a woman!

The topic of the debate is “Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance”. I’m not exactly sure what there is to debate. It seems like a pointless folly to me. I’m hoping we’ll have a bit of fun with it.

In the spirit of web 2.0 and user participation, I urge you to contribute to the wiki I’ve created for the occasion. I’m really counting on some user contributions. Please don’t let me down.

This afternoon I met with my fellow debatrs Brenda Leeuwenberg and Che Tibby to plot our triumph, over lunch at Ka Pai (my new favorite lunch venue – I’ve eaten there 3 days in a row – finally yummy, affordable salads in Wellington!).

Maybe we could all do a Meetup prior to Webstock? No flashmobs please.

It reminds me of Pedro, a super fun little Ai app created a few years back by Cactus Lab. It’s always that odd unnerving feeling that maybe there is actually a real person on the other end, taking the piss. In fact, a little interrogation of Pedro reveals a strange mention of the ALICE bot. Hmmm…

Found via (via Edurev via Reemer)

Here is the back story and source of the video. They’re currently making an updated version and they want you to contribute your thoughts and questions.