2009 Prediction – You will be turned out and pimped. And you will think its cool.
2009 is the year that half of the web becomes a Facebook App and content providers sell you out in a desperate grab for advertising money. And you’ll go along for the ride, because it’ll be cool.
You will be given the option to sign into most of your favorite sites using your Facebook login. Most of the other login options will be lame services you’ve never heard of or a lengthy signup process. By the time the other big players (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) get it together, FB will likely be dominant. FB will also offer the coolest widgets, the only way to comment, and the added feature of your bringing your breadcrumbs back to your FB profile for all of your friends to see. Some of us are already doing this rather hackily using FriendFeed and such, but I’m sure we’ll all line up when we can save a few clicks and have better integration. FB users will finally see how powerful aggregation can be, and, yes, it will be cool.
Instead of just opening access to the FB platform, FB has turned the tables and is giving publishers the tools to embed FB everywhere. Starting with their Comments Box release yesterday, I believe we will soon see Rate This (or Like This (hello Digg and FriendFeed!)) and Share This boxes using FB Connect. Open source developers will quickly mold these into plugins for Drupal, Wordpress and countless other platforms, making them easily available and accessible to a large array of content producers. Bonus points if FB adds a Commerce box, however I believe FB will stick to its knitting and keep commerce internal (gifts, etc.).
How do these widgets create actual revenue? The FB ad serving engine. What good are ads on websites without demographic data to target them and specific tracking data to measure performance? FB will give you this, and Google will continue to be unable to. Think of it as the Son of Beacon for the Internet at large.
Conventional wisdom says “advertising dollars dry up in a down economy.” However, I disagree. It’s true that blind and shot-gun approach (dumb) advertising is indefensible to bean counters. However, highly targeted advertising with crystal clear results will do just fine in the rough year ahead. Give the bean counters some demonstrable ROI, and they’ll open up their checkbooks. Give site owners sticky features that users love, and a way to make more money and they’ll open up their databases. At the center of this lovefest is Facebook and your profile. Feels a little dirty, right?
While the “App sites” may still not be able to make a living on advertising, and ad revenue-based business models will likely fail, FB itself will do very well, and will present site owners and entrepreneurs with a very compelling case to get hitched. Expect strange bedfellows. Expect large transactions. Expect more privacy issues. Expect to be turned out and pimped.
Oh, and in 2009 newspapers will continue their death spiral. Yawn. What’s that? The New York Times is a Facebook Connect partner? How about that.
This post was originally written as a comment on VentureBeat (an excellent blog with excellent writers).
Hat tip to @mickipedia with whom I discussed this last week over drinks.
