On the Open Data front, both Facebook Connect and Google’s Open Social gained adoption this year. It is now possible to stick more widgets on your websites than ever before. This is the first steps to writing code once and running it one several platforms, along with moving data between platforms more easily.

Pull Vs. Push materialized in a different way. One of twitter’s biggest feature was the ability to stay connected to your network via SMS. SMS is a push technology that alerts you when someone posted. Apple made a big deal of their PUSH capabilities on the iPhone, which were less than well designed. Jabber/XMPP is an interesting technology that, I feel, is still under-rated.

As for unconnected devices, Violet.net has released their Mir:ror RFID reader and soon their Dal:dal which gives you ambient feedback based on weather or stocks. Other companies have released devices such as Wattson (http://www.diykyoto.com/uk) which monitors your electricity usage. While the attention might have been on the iPhone that doesn’t mean that people aren’t developing more and more of these nontraditional connected devices.

Home computer hardware kits becoming more available. While I will admit they haven’t shown-up at your big box electronics store, they have become easier and more refined. Most people here seem to assume this is a built-it yourself computer. I had in mind more general hardware kits like the kind you can pick-up at tinker.it a good gauge of popularity is when they begin to make cheaper knock-off versions of the same technology, hence the freedurino and Chinese version of the Arduino boards. Botanicalls is also a hardware kit to give a voice and twitter account to your plants. This is a weekend project DIY kit. There are also OpenSource instructions for building your own robot blimps out there. They do exist, but you need to know where to look, unfortunately, 2008 was not the year they broke through to the mainstream, here’s hoping for 2009.

Geographically based searches. Given the next version of iPhoto has geo-search and tagging we should see a lot more people introduced to this concept in 2009 as well.

Thanks for going through and seeing what came of my predictions and what didn’t. Here’s to an exciting 2009!

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Best greetings
Basia

I also predicted that the amount of hair on my back would, for the first time in my life, exceed the quantum of hair appearing on my head.
Once again, albeit unfortunately, spot on!!!!!!

Life’s a b*tch when you’re as good at predicting stuff as I am!!!

…Sorry too much Java (both varieties!)