Every time a new technology is introduced the majority of the people are skeptical. How can we use this and do we really need this? I remember ten years ago when the mobile phone became populair. I also remember me being against it. I despised guys or girls showing off their new mobile phones and 8-bit ringtones. I still hate the ringtones but I’m a vivid smartphone user. Back then I just couldn’t see the advantages and now I can’t live without it. The same is happening to Twitter. How can a service which limits you to 140 characters a post be of any value? It’s looks like a tool for exhibitionists wanting to vent their whole life. Slowly but surely we come to see what Twitter is really capable of. This became clear to me last week. I got a call from my girlfriend telling me that a colleague of her was stranded on the Utrecht Central train station because of a bomb threat. I had to travel to Utrecht that day so I checked the biggest Dutch news website (nu.nl) to see if there were any reports. Nothing. A search on Google also returned irrelevant results. I went to twitter.com and typed in “Utrecht” in the big search box and instantly I got all the information I wanted. Twitter users posting updates about the bomb threat were in abundance. Every second 50 new bits of information were added. I got to see pictures taken with mobile phones of the secluded area’s. I got the latest updates on what police officers were telling the public. This is the way citizen journalism works. The hive mind gave me a lot of information very quickly. That beings said it is important to be careful with the information being posted on Twitter. The facts are not checked and the information may be false which, for instance, can lead to celebrities being declared dead who are still much alive. Even Though Twitter is proving to be very valuable for citizen journalism and journalism as a whole. Next time I want to be updated on the latest information of an event I know where I’m going: Twitter.

Once there was a war between the search engines. We all know who the won that war: Google. We can hardly remember what we used before Google (Altavista? Yahoo?). A new war is raging. Facebook is stepping up and is putting the pressure on Google. But it’s Google throwing the first punch.

Last week a lot of Google  Software Engineers deactivated their Facebook accounts. This exodus started because of to the announcement on Facebook’s F8 conference concerning the change in privacy settings. Facebook is opening up to third party sites (such as Yelp) to make your surfing a more personal experience. This move by Google’s employees is interesting because the whole things looks orchestrated. Is this a spontaneous reaction or were these Google workers encouraged?

The decision by Facebook to open up is making the social website a serious competitor for Google. The way Google indexes the web is very theoritical, very ‘mechanical’. The 100+ factors in the algorhythm decide the ranking of websites depending on the search query. The machine is the boss. Facebook is going to do the opposite. It is now possible for website owners to place a Facebook ‘I like it’ button on their website. This way the website which is ‘liked’ the best will get higher in the rankings. An added layer is that you see how your (Facebook) friends have interacted with the website you’re looking at. So instead of asking help of a machine (Google) with a search query you now turn to your friends (Facebook). What do they reccomend? Which websites do they like? This technique is not new (delicious is already doing this) but the big difference is the huge user base. Some sources even claim that Facebook’s traffic is surpassing Google’s. This in combination with the opening up to third parties is creating a very powerfull new way to surf the web. If we now look at the Google developers shutting down their accounts in perspective it looks like a pre-emptive strike. To openly question Facebook’s privacy settings and make a public stance means the war has started. Or maybe it already started when Facebook denied Google from crawling their website? Anyway the next couple of years we are going to see some fireworks with Google and Facebook going head to head.

In the end we, the users, are always the winners because this means both parties have to be creative and innovative to obtain a loyal userbase. So I encourage this battle: Go war!

YouTube, Digg and Twitter. Three great websites with a massive following. But these websites all have one big problem: They don’t know how to make money. 2009 will be the year of the business model. These three services will have to to find a way to convert all their visitors and exposure into money. Because if they can’t make money than they are useless from a commercial point of view.

YouTube
Google, owner of Youtube, will have to cut it’s losses when YouTube keeps burning cash. So Google is likely to push the adwords idea through on YouTube. A sponsored video is likely to pop up on YouTube search results any time soon. We’re already seeing advertising in the actual video’s.

Digg
Digg is becoming a bottomless well. Digg has 22.6 million unique monthly visitors but last year they lost 2.6 million dollar. I’m very interreseted in the way Digg will try to earn money this year. They have a very though demographic (18-35 year old males) who are not really sensitive for banner advertising.

Twitter
Twitter has been booming the last year. It’s becoming mainstream and has a hard time keeping the service up and running because their servers can’t handle the load. And the infrastructure costs money. Lots of money. But don’t worry the godfather of Twitter, Evan Williams, said they have found a way to make money but he is keeping it a secret for now. Exciting. My guess is that they will start selling data. All those people are twittering about products and services, data which could be very useful for big corporations. It’s also an ideal way to find out what’s hot. If a lot of people start twittering about the same subject it’s bound to get hot.

As I said, 2009 has to be the year of the businnes model and making money, Else we might see some little bubbles burst again.