Vaya Con Dios, 2009. Out With The Old...
2009 was so much more of an epic year than many know. People will realize it much later, but this will be the final year of the internet as we know it.
- We will never see a low barrier market again as we have in the past, particularly like the one during “web 2.0” (2005-2009). Up, up, up the walls will go. The internet has not been a place with much real competition in the past but this will change now as the platform is ready and moving to be our society’s sole information distribution and communications source. Entrepreneurship will take more money, effort and experience as the landscape shifts.
- We will likely see changes to the social internet (aka, social media) — it will go beyond social networking to a suite of communications tools for users and user activity will change. This landscape will be far different than anything anybody’s experienced. It will disrupt those who have heavily rooted their work in social media as the needs of companies will change and things become more complex.
- We will at long last witness the very needed death of the page view. The fact that it lasted for five years as the industry’s key measurement tool despite being flawed, gamed and often dishonest is just wrong. Many people knew this but the majority did not. It created an entire era in the internet’s evolution where many things were essentially false.
- We will likely watch the end of traffic gaming tactics as a main web business strategy (such as SEO) as more begin to understand that traffic is not audience, and audience is the true object of value. Businesses do not survive without customers. Things like SEO will still be used as a suite of tools to help create audience but the large position and value it held will shift.
- There will probably never be another moment in the internet’s history like this one for blogs. Companies are already beginning to shy away from them and being pegged as them. In the end, blogging and digital media are the same things. Digital publishing is digital publishing, and the infiltration of devices will close the gap. The differentiation may never exist again in the future as it has to date.
- We will not see a telecommunications, TV, and media industry in the future as we’ve seen in the past. It is the true coming end.
- We will possibly not feel an internet that felt so free — identity and the surveillance of users will take very interesting shifts in the future, some potentially frightening. Many will be sorry later to have drilled so deeply. The coming awareness of vulnerabilities (cyber criminals, etc.) will make users more cautious about sharing in the years to come.
- There will never be another moment in time where business was so enamored at the sound of the consumer’s voice. In the future, the novelty will wear off. Walls will go back up.
- We will never see the internet the same again. It will never be constrained to a fixed PC or laptop ever again as it has been for more than two decades, but free to integrate into anything and everything, and it will.
2009 brings the end of a long exhausting era of innovation and evolution that went so far beyond what anybody in web/media/etc 2.0 will ever know. It took years and thousands of engineers to create it, solve the interoperability issues, set up the things that would make it work and compliant — what once could only deliver a packet so small it was limited to email now has the ability to do everything it was brought to life to do. Epic. Welcome to a very new world, 2010.
