My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

This week I want to talk about one of the hands-down best sites on the internet. Mint.com, in case you haven’t heard about Mint yet, it’s like Quicken or Microsoft Money just online. You create an account on the website, login, add your account information. From there mint connects to each of your accounts, pulls down your transaction history, automatically categorizes your spending into categories, and then will send you alerts for budgets or other settings via text or email. Oh, and best of all since it knows where you’re spending your money, it tells you how you can save.

So since mint sounds great and wonderful, and it indeed is, I’m going to jump straight in and start addressing issues people may already have about this kind of site. The first is security, why would I give all of my account information away to a single place so someone could walk in and take every penny I have? Well first account information is hashed, it’s not just sitting in some text file on some desktop, its quite secure. Next, well mint gives you warnings right? So if someone goes and buys a car with you’re credit card you’ll get a text message about it. Now I may be missing something, but my bank has never offered me that kind of service. Oh and best of all, just because you put your account information, you still have the normal security backing of your bank and liability.

Worried about a company having so much information on you? What if I told you in a matter of minutes if I know you’re name I could likely have your past 3 residences, phone numbers, and other information. Or for that matter if you’re concerned with a company having that information, do you pay cash for everything. Because if you don’t the credit card companies have just as much information, and they and other companies often sell this information. Mint.com promises not to do such. So if your argument is that you don’t want people to know that much information about you, its a very valid one, but hypocritical if you don’t always use cash which, which in ways can still be traceable.

Finally I just want to highlight my favorite thing about mint.com. They get web 3.0, sure they have a rich interface, decent categorization, and good alerts. But best of all, they know where I spend my money, they know generic stuff about me, but because of that they can recommend to me ways I can actually save money. Now it may be just me, but I’m pretty sure everyone out there would like to save money. So its great to show ways that I truly can save money, not typical propaganda that is a waste of time for me.

So this week they announced what many expected was coming the iPhone 3g. However off the shelf it’s still not web  2.0, while a great device its not a web 2.0 device yet. Apple without a doubt understands user experience, but they do not fully grasp web 2.0 yet. Microsoft seems to even have a better understanding with the products they are looking to role out with Mesh and their enterprise social/collaboration tools. Lot’s of great applications were highlighted at the keynote, but only one of those talking about publishing content (with the exception of mobileme, which is a paid service). While there’s no doubt I will be getting the new iPhone when it is released in July, I will not talk about how it is a great web 2.0 device.

If the application store is as open as Apple alludes to it being, then I can see how it will quickly become a web 2.0 device. Loopt is likely the strongest contender for helping to build a location based social network, and when they release for the iPhone can turn it into a web 2.0 device. I’ll be most anxious to see how the push based services they announced will help to allow developers to turn it into a web 2.0 device as well. If I had to have my application constantly up it just doesn’t work out as a full enabler for web 2.0. BUT if you allow notifications to be regularly pushed it just simplifies and increases the regularity of community and people staying in touch.

The tipping point though for me at least will be if or when Apple finally allows video on the video. No, not playing video, but recording and streaming video. The kind of abilities available on a nokia n95, or available in my apple computer through iChat. When I can pull my phone out of my pocket and display to the world what I’m doing or where I’m at, you will have a device that allows you to communicate and most of all collaborate like any other before. It doesnt require more power than is already there, in fact I can record video on my jailbroken phone right now. The nokia n95 does a great job of streaming live video to qik, which is how I watched much of the Apple Keynote, it simply takes Apple finally understanding web 2.0 and embracing it.

I recently read an article on Techcrunch on how web 2.0 had undoubtedly made an impact, but had yet to truly make money. From my stance they is really one way to make money on the web, which is through advertising (paid subscription services are dying). This can either be done through a simple banner ad, or something that can more easily be deemed a qualified lead or referral. Ads will always be there, but if web 2.0 is to start making money it must be on improving the measurement and throughput of qualified leads.

Without going into too much detail on referrals and qualified leads I’d like to mention a great example of this, mint.com. Mint offers a great free service of managing your personal finances. Throwing out security and sharing your data (another time another place), they do a great job of categorizing and monitoring your finances. In exchange they have access to your spending history. So you give them your spending history, in exchange that have hundreds of thousands of peoples data, such as what credit card you use, who your cable provider is. With this mint does what I believe is a good job of generating referrals, but telling you how much you can save by switching from Internet provider A at $60 per month to Internet provider B at $30 per month. They’re not just giving ads for the sake of it, they’re giving me something that I would actually want.

Does this lead to higher or lower revenue? We’ll this I’m not sure of, but with regards to advertising, feel this is a more better fit for a user. I only get things that the service provider thinks I want not what they think they can sell me. As we reach more of the semantic understanding of the web I believe this will prevail and make web 2.0 more profitable, but it cannot be done with web 2.0 alone.

As I’ve become more or less a web 2.0 whore. I’ve also had a great interest in web 3.0 and what it will fortell. Most believe natural language and the semantic web will play a large role in that. And while it will that will not be the end result of web 3.0. While web 2.0 included AJAX and Flex, that really doesn’t fully encompass what they are. Web 3.0 to sum it up most simply will be about reducing the noise of the web. While I can take very little credit for this idea as I have heard others say the same or at least similar things, there is an interesting side that I believe most have not thought about.

You see, in order to reduce the noise of the web you have to know about me and what I consider noise. In order for someone to do this we have to be willing to give up information about ourselves, some of which people consider private. I still recall a conversation which I posted on a few days ago about users not wanting to give out their private information. I believe this attitude is very quickly becoming old hat, while there are individuals that will stay this way for several decades as a collective whole it’s a fleeting attitude. I think for example of mint.com which I willingly give all of my financial account information to in order for them to simplify my life. Instead of a massive collection of emails and notifications I get summarized views from them. While there still is the chance for noise as I could receive text messages about every transaction that happens, I have the ability now to filter that noise.

Noise is something that some people love, take scoble for example who loves having hundreds of twitter messages fly across his screen every few minutes. Though for the vast majority to reduce the noise to allow us to accomplish more in a day, but also have more time to enjoy it will be the key to the future of the web.

I’ve talked with some that believe that government policy will come after people start to become too open with their information. My perspective is that as long as there are safeguards around that information then there will be little barriers to users giving it away freely very soon. But in truth only time will tell at how well companies and products can reduce this noise and truly learn about a user, and if there will be regulation preventing such improvements.

Spend five minutes talking to me about technology or business and you’ll quickly realize I’m a fan of Adobe AIR. Adobe has done a very good job building a cross-platform runtime, and providing tools that make the transition from the web to the desktop quite minimal.

First to elaborate why I like AIR. For one I’m a fan of web 2.0, the sites feel cleaner, smoother, and drive new capabilities. Versus most desktop applications that are starting to feel old, and much like 1990′s Java Applets do on the web. With Flex Builder, which is an IDE for developing for flash and/or AIR, I can develop a sweet website, but then quickly port it to the desktop while maintaining a rich web 2.0 feel.

Second, did I mention it’s cross-platform? Windows, OSX, Linux, the application in AIR will look/feel/function the same. So what? This could have been done other ways right? Well here is where I start to place my bets, no one else has really done anything in this area as well as Adobe so far. Also Adobe has made their long term strategy clear, they want to truly become a cross-platform runtime. If you’re thinking what other platforms right now, you’re not thinking large enough. They want AIR to support mobile phones, set-top boxes, likely even gaming consoles. This means I can look at one application on multiple mediums with an either identical look, of very similar one, with minimal development efforts. This allows a developer to then focus even further on improving functionality.

Finally, a bit of a rant. Adobe AIR does not have a true competitor, Silverlight is a competitor to flash (not AIR), Google Gears might be the closest thing to it. But, with regard to gears taking a website and making it available offline isn’t all AIR can do. AIR has local file access, local access to some devices, which when you’re still within a browser you can’t do. Oh, and one feature I personally just like is the auto-update ability of applications.

So….. If it’s so great, why haven’t you heard of it and why aren’t you using it? Well the single problem seems to be people building applications on it. I’ve seen very few applications that would appeal to mainstream users. I (being an avid fan of AIR and anything web 2.0), will typically use 2 AIR applications per day. One being twhirl, which I use as my primary twitter client. The other tends to vary by needs. However this is contrasted with about 20 applications that I work in over a given day. Most AIR applications thus far are simple, one-off fun applications. Perhaps to really make some penetration there should be some of the following:

• Financial/Stock tool that takes advantage of Adobe’s charting abilities
• Word Application
• Spreadsheet Editor
• Central social networking aggregator (Think one stop stop to view and update all web 2.0 networks)
• Email client