Long Shots for 2008

So we made it, 2008 is 2 days old and here is my obligatory preview of the year. The year started well for me with fireworks over San Francisco which are visible from my apartment building. As you can see, the emerald tower (The Infinity - Luxury condominiums) blocked the view somewhat but we were still able to enjoy them. Now I don't gamble much because I am spectacularly bad at it, I can't resist that 500-1 outsider, even though I know it will never win I can't resist that value. So in that spirit here are my long shot predictions for 2008 in no particular order:

1) Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, reddit and all the similar services will be bought, merge or become irrelevant.

I have been playing around with them and apart from Del.icio.us don't find them helpful at all. What I want is feeds and access to my friend's feeds and why do I want that in multiple places? I can either use my social networking tool of choice, such as facebook to monitor what my fiends are looking at and what they like. As the rise in social networks tells us, people care about what their friends and contacts are doing, we don't care that 600 teenage girls digg some Justin Timberlake video (unless I am a teenage girl perhaps) so put the 'diggs' of my friends in facebook where everything else is thanks and that drives the ad revenue to facebook.

UPDATE: del.icios.us was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, let's see what happens with the others if they are not already acquired - sorry for the oversight.

2) Amazon will buy Salesforce.com

I know Jake is predicting Google will buy them, but what about Amazon?

One Laptop per Child - Better than an iPhone?

The One Laptop per Child program has had somewhat of a rocky ride, it was envisaged that they would cost $100 and be made available to all school age children in developing countries. However they're costing $200 and the orders have not been flooding in from the governments of developing countries. They're now not known as the $100 laptop and are called the XO.

However these things do appear to be amazing devices, a review in laptop magazine mused that they are more revolutionary than the iPhone. Now I have a bunch of macs around the house and am a big fan of apple products, but I think the XO which can be dropped, withstand 120F temperatures and hase a great mesh network and some nice looking collaboration software designed to connect kids in devloping countries has to be better than a phone, even one made by apple.

Although the XO is intended for developing countries, many people in the US were interested so they came up with another innovative idea, if you want to buy one you need to give one. Reading my good friend Alvin's blog I saw his had arrived and I look forward to seeing how his kids get along with it. Alvin has done a good job of introducing his kids to all kinds of tech gear; computers, photography and he even tought his daughter how to DJ so they should pick the XO up pretty quick.

So I just decided to Give One Get One, the program has been extended until the end of the year so you still have a few days left if you're interested.

UPDATE:

I see a great comparison of the OLPC, Kimble and iPhone by Mike Hendrickson on O'Reilly