How did I do?

1. Kiva will break $100m in loans

Yes, Kiva broke $100m in November.
2. Microsoft will buy Facebook

No, FB went to the Russians and seems to have plenty of venture cash in the bank despite making relatively small amounts per user.

3. Google will buy Delicious

No. Would be cheap to pick up and they have Schachter on board and social search is their weakness. Nevertheless they opted for deals with Twitter and FB.

4. Microsoft will buy what’s left of Yahoo

No. Is there any point? Will they pick up AOL instead? Why they would want either is a mystery to me but they seem to want it. Maybe search is the attraction.

5. Jerry Yang will leave Yahoo for good

No. He’s still there.

6. Steve Jobs will step down as Apple CEO

No – very glad to be wrong here.

7. Social networking will crack its business model

No. As I said in 1 FB is still making about $2/3 per user per year and having to raise more venture money. More interestingly the insiders are selling their stock.

8. Google’s share of online advertising dollars will fall

No. This is a guess as I don’t have the time to do a reliable analysis.

So, one for eight overall which is pretty bad. In my defence I went for some fairly bold predictions, plus I predicted things which could not be fudged. Stay tuned for my 2010 predictions.

We launched. It took longer than expected to get things ironed out but we now have a fully working product. So what is it?

Looking for a film to watch

I came up with the idea when I was looking for a film to watch but had no idea what I wanted to see. I ended up browsing my friends’ profile pages on facebook looking for a recommendation. When I saw one of my friends liked Office Space I went and bought the film. This triggered the thought that advertising alongside a list of friend recommendations would be extremely powerful. So we built a facebook application which does that.

It is very simple. You make lists of your favourite films, books, music, TV, gadgets and travel destinations. These are collected together in a way which is easy to browse and when you click on a specific term, a related ad shows for that recommendation. So if you click on my recommendation of the book Disgrace by JM Coetzee, an ad for that book will show.

It takes a step back in the search process from Google. If you have something specific in mind then Google is great. However if you know you are looking for a holiday but don’t know where to go Google doesn’t really help. What you really need is to see where your friends recommend.

Choose Our Cause

Our app is called Choose Our Cause because when we have enough users to start selling ads we will split the revenue with the users who can donate it to a cause they support. I am doing this to support the charity my Dad set up, HiCEP (www.hicep.org.uk). HiCEP is a small charity which runs a school and library in my Dad’s home town of Beled Weyne in Somalia. I wanted to come up with a new way of fundraising for small causes like HiCEP and Choose Our Cause is what we have built.

I could not have done it without my co-founder Paul and our developers Coublis. They are the technical ones and Choose Our Cause would not exist without them. That it works is entirely down to them and the process of building it made me realise how long the distance is between an idea and the working product. It was hard work so please take a look:

http://apps.facebook.com/chooseourcause/

Alan Rusbridger, Guardian Editor, has written a column about the 10 most influential technologies in the last decade. I agree with some (Google, Wikipedia) but not others (Spotify, iPlayer) so I thought I would do my own:

Blogger. Out of loyalty to my chosen platform I should say WordPress but I have chosen Blogger. Evan Williams got there first, he had the flexibility of mind to ditch a failing startup to focus on what was getting traction. Unfortunately the bust came along but Williams soldiered through and sold to Google just before the float. Blogger made blogging easy and took it mainstream, it gave a huge number of people the chance to try their hand at writing without the usual gatekeepers. The emergence of blogs has been revolutionary and Blogger played a huge part in that.

Delicious. The great lost opportunity but no less important for that. Delicious showed a completely different way of indexing the web and had the potential to be as big as Google. I have said many times before the sheer beauty of Delicious is that it knows what links I am interested in and who else saved the same links. It is a nascent form of indexing built not on links between pages but links between people. Google is the index built by the web’s authors and Delicious had the potential to be the index built by the web’s users. In fact it was bought by Yahoo who showed a tremendous lack of vision for the company, Joshua Schachter left for Google and it now looks like it could be sold off. Lucky the person who has a bit of insight and picks it up on the cheap. It is still potentially revolutionary after all these years.

Napster. Not the pale music sub service which now bears the name but the original peer to peer network built by Shawn Fanning. Brought a giant industry to its knees and showed the future of media distribution. P2p is not so popular these days but the elegance of the technology and the lack of infrastructure investment mean that it will be relevant for years to come. All it needs is the right business model and someone with the vision to exploit the technology properly.

iPod. Again not the iPhone or the iPod touch, but the original 5gb music player. After Napster came along all people needed was an easy to use, elegant device which could store and play MP3s easily. The iPod wasn’t the first but Steve Jobs spotted a gap where other players were terrible devices and had the vision and boldness to drive his entire company through it.

Freindster. The cautionary tale for Facebook. First mover in social networking but just showed that having users locked up is no defence against new intruders, poor management lost its pre-eminent position but Friendster showed the way early in the decade.

phpBB forums. A true invention of the decade having first been released by James Atkinson on June 17, 2000. In my view this is the most compelling social software out there and I believe this concept will be at the heart of the next generation of social networks. The problem with them at present is that there is no common space. Human beings love to meet and talk on common ground, from the caveman’s camp fire to the local pub. The company to recreate this atmosphere on the web will be huge.