The 2005 year was really big for lots of people and companies, and I think 2006 is going to be even better. Here are my predictions for the upcoming year.
Technology
Turning Kinja Around, Web 2.0 Style
Kinja is the Nick Denton project from early 2004 that, paraphrased from his own words, didn’t quite make it. It lags behind the other Gawker properties by a hefty amount of traffic and just never got off the ground the way Nick, Meg or the web industry envisioned it would. Denton felt it was a flop, but in many ways its business goals and technology were far ahead of its time. If Kinja were launched/re-launched now it would need to compete with the likes of Bloglines, My Yahoo!, My Web 2.0, Delicious (okay, so all of Yahoo!) and a host of other “web 2.0” aggregators and homepages. Here are some key elements that, if executed properly, might make Kinja mighty again.
Squidoo Says My Lens Needs Improving
I was a beta tester for Squidoo early on, and honestly, I still have no clue about what it does. People can run their own weblogs, so why write on Squidoo? People want to determine their own content types, so why only stick to the “modules” Squidoo provides? I don’t get it, but maybe lots of other people do and I’m in the minority. Either way, I got this funny email from the Squidoo beta team just this morning and I thought I’d republish it to see if you guys got the same kick out of it:
No Firewire On Intel iBooks???
Mr. Jason O’Grady is reporting at ZDNet that the rumored Intel iBooks coming in January will not have Firewire (IEEE-1394) inputs, continuing a trend started with iPods dropping Firewire for USB 2.0. Wow, let’s hope this can’t be true, because…