What was 2003 like?

C|Net saw 2003 as the year in which the scourge of spam could no longer be contained, whilst Google's Zeitgeist thinks the UK was more interested in Prince Charles and Eastenders than overall popular favourites Britney Spears and Harry Potter, or indeed world events.

The NYT Magazine cites 67 defining ideas from 2003, including social networks, but Dave Pollard bemoans their lack of imagination and starts his own more considered review.

For Lawrence Lessig, it was the best and worst of times and he thanks his readers for helping him through.

Superconnected blogger Joi Ito provides an end of year account appropriately based on the bottom line of raw web site stats (up 460%, in case you are wondering).

David Weinberger enjoyed grape-nuts and yoghurt as well as Curry and E-minor, but I guess he also enjoyed being closely involved in one of the year's big issues: the Howard Dean internet phenomenon.

We all have our views of the year gone by. For our team, it was a fantastic transitional period between old and new structures, full of positive karma, happy coincidences and new relationships with old acquaintances - strong signals that we made the right choice in leaving our comfortable old shell behind. Freedom smells good, and one year on we can now be quite open and proud of what we have achieved since exit.

What of 2004?

The Washington Post thinks saying "Sui Generis" is 'in' this year, whilst Robert X. Cringely thinks we will see the start of real digital convergence (8 years late) and spam will worsen. CNN thinks there will be a digital music shakeout and offshore outsourcing will become an election issue. The BBC predicts that wireless net access will be a big issue in 2004, with BT launching a wireless broadband week on January 26.

Personal communication and sharing tools will undoubtedly evolve just as fast in 2004 as they did in 2003. Clay Shirky writes about an article that makes him think 2004 will be the year webcams achieve every-day communication usage. Internetnews.com sees BitTorrent as a technology to watch for peer to peer file transfer and big players will bring products to bear on the social networking market. eWeek celebrates RSS, Apple's iSight/iChatAV combo, Hydra and NetNewsWire.

On the high street, The Guardian and many others see 2004 as the year of the iPod; rumours of new versions abound. Apple's 20th year may see the company finally achieve a market share commensurate with their design values. Indeed, Fortune's Tech Skeptic thinks dead-battery iPods will become "must-have doorstops" for the swell set.

In the UK and elsewhere, progress towards e-government targets will need to increase as we move towards 2005 and 2008. The insider weblog eGovernment@Large believes we will see "the citizen at the centre" (fewer, more focused websites; Central and local services aggregated, with consistent navigation and multi-channel delivery), fewer online brands, a shift from silo to enterprise thinking, business leadership taking control of the technology, which will mean cross-business alignment and rationalisation, and more and more success stories. More broadly, I would guess that the targets themselves will be re-cast to allow practitioners to focus on creating value through online interaction rather than just make available any number of individual services without addressing real user needs. Lessons may also be learned from bottom-up initiatives such as iSociety, iCan, FaxYourMP and moveon.org.

In the Corporate sector, there will probably be another cycle of investment in enterprise systems, but the time seems to be right for a new approach to communication and knowledge sharing systems based on smaller, loosely coupled components that are native to the fabric of the organisation and evolve through usage. This will be cheaper, lower risk and potentially much more effective than continuing co-dependent cash-burning relationships with mega-vendors - the same applies to central government.

The Observer's John Naughton thinks that last year's decision by Munich's local government to swicth 14,000 PCs to Open Source software despite increasingly desperate discount offers from Microsoft will prove a turning point in the "transition from vendor-to-consumer-dominance" and 2004 will see:

"more Open Source angst for Microsoft; stock market hysteria over a possible Google flotation; increasing concern in the West over China's new-found talent for creating computer software; limited progress on controlling spam; relentless expansion in British broadband access; increasing penetration of digital radio into homes; too many emails; and periodical moral panics about online porn and paedophilia. The mixture as before, in other words."

But what of social software?

Looking back, April's Emerging Technology Conference was a key moment in the development of the area broadly dubbed social software. We became (and remain) very excited indeed about the potential for social software ideas to impact various areas of online interaction; we released our draft paper Smarter, Simpler, Social into the wild to clarify our thinking and it proceeded to do a fine job of networking on our behalf, finding some great people with similar interests and views who we would otherwise have missed.

Subsequently, we saw a variety of new developments in both underlying technologies and new online social networking services. By November, we were even wondering whether we are seeing another mini-bubble that might poison the well for more meaningful future social networking applications.

More recently, Om Malik echoed the feelings of many about the first generation social networking sites: "why ... should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities?". In response, Clay shirky suggested that "the trick Om wants to pull off, and its the trick of all decentralized applications, is to reconstruct the logic of collective action so that users can create value for themselves, without having their data held hostage." David Weinberger also pointed out that "if you want to get at the real social networks, you’re going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have worn into the actual social carpet," and suggested the value of the YASNSs (Yet Another Social Networking Site) will be as a tool for specific applications rather than an end in themselves. The Register has even thrown a security punch at the YASNSs, so some kind of reassessment has clearly started - but a reassessment of what?

2003 saw the development of various strands of social software, not just online social networking; for example blogging tools, collaboration tools, communication devices and software, protocols for knowledge sharing, , social network mapping and mining, among others. Each of these has a variety of potential applications across a wide range of business sectors and areas of life in general.

We are still just learning about the ways in which we could use online social applications and tools to improve communication and cooperation. New ideas and developments are emerging all the time, and important debates are going on about standards, online identity, reputation systems and the law. In writing a short piece about 2004, Cory Doctorow made a comment that prompted an interesting debate that rumbles on about the need to focus on policy/social norms rather than just continue inventing cool stuff:

"the next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them."

In fact, it is not just about the policy and social norms needed to exploit the technology to effect real change; it is also about creating various real-world applications of the technology. Innovation remains important, but it should be built on a solid foundation of involvement with real groups of people trying to use the ideas, tools and techniques of social software to improve their (working) lives in some small way. This experience will be a lot more valuable to the development of social software in 2004 than tools to capture the raw contents of a million FOAF files, inboxes and document stores.

That is what we hope our 2004 will be about: working with people to deliver real-world applications of social software thinking that make a difference, whilst learning more about the cultural and behavioural issues that can mean the difference between success and failure.