Enjoyed reading John Battelle's predictions for 2008 which many have been waiting for and salivating over for the last month, including Robert Scoble, who interviewed Battelle earlier last month.

I think, as life keeps accelerating, it gets harder to get enough ahead of what's happening and decide what the future trends are going to be for the next year(s) - and the way John Battelle has dealt with that, I think, is focus on what he knows, the companies in his horizon. 

When I met Howard Rheingold a few months ago at this home in Mill Valley, he mentioned the reason he's not writing another book right now is due to the Event Horizon (An Event Horizon is .."…the boundary that represents the maximum distance at which events can currently be observed. For events beyond that distance, light hasn't had time to reach our location, even if it were emitted at the time the universe began.")being so close - we're in the phenomenon, and it's really hard to predict where it all goes from here.  

All the more reason why John Battelle's predictions are valuable - hell… my predictions were about 75% correct, his a little more, but he predicts about stuff that is very Web 2.0, companies that are name brands, companies that he knows and deals with - companies and situations that define the current landscape and future landscape of media - when John Battelle comes up with a scenario of how things will spin out next year, it's time to take a look and listen to it.

So what does John Battelle say?:

"… 2008 will be the year of integration indigestion for the majors, and as such, it will mean M&A will slow down for those companies.  "

I think John means the media and search companies he tracks - but M&A will slow down anyway due to the credit crunch from the fallout of Sub-Prime Mortgages and Corporate Bonds both going south.    I would think, the bar will be raised on what it takes for companies to combine - maybe just the expectation of profits or lower costs won't be enough.  

 "…Another trend we'll see is the continued erosion of the traditional mobile oligarchy. But despite the best efforts of Android, not much will get done this year. Don't worry, though, by 2009, we'll finally see a mobile web worthy of a serious development economy, one that looks a lot like Web 2 looked in 2005."

That was not a hard prediction to make, the Wireless Auction is going forward - yet it's going to take a while, yet, before the big carriers (Sprint/Nextel, ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) come out of the dark age of their propitiatory setups and come up with standards that enable the development economy Battelle speaks about - I think he sees that 2008 is a year of developments, but no real breakthroughs here - even it it seems like there will be a breakthrough - it won't happen, really, till 2009.

"….company has incredible numbers, and will continue to impress, but analysts, tired of bidding up the stock, will start to question the company's myriad ocean-boiling projects - after all, it's merely trying to reinvent Health, Energy, Telecom, IT (both consumer apps and OSes), and a few other major portions of the GDP. Look for a few querulous analyst reports and even a few downgrades by the end of the year, as Wall Street finally comes out of its honeymoon stage with Google and demands that the company consolidate its control in markets where profits are secure: Search and AdSense. Look for complaints about profits and integration (or lack thereof) with regard to Doubleclick, and at least one major product flop that gets analyst tongues wagging. Google will continue to struggle with its display advertising business, at least as it is traditionally understood, in part due to a culture conflict between its engineering-based roots and the thousands of media-savvy sales and marketing folks the company has hired in the past two years."

Well, it's about time for Wall Street to fall out of love with Google - Google has become like the 1000 head hydra, expanding in all directions, trying to take over the world - but as it continues to expand out - it becomes more diffuse and the more acquisitions it makes, the more likely that some of them will fail.  John feels this is the year that Google really fails at something - and I agree - it's about time Google realized it's not infallible.

Battelle is writing another book, it looks like…I wonder what it's going to be about?

BTW, my own predictions for 2008  are  here (Web and Economic) and here (mostly Economic Predictions for 2008). Meanwhile I discovered a Prediction for December 27th come true with Benazir Bhutto assassinated.  Weird, I read about that prediction on December 25th - and about 36 hours later - it happened.