As 2008 beckons, I thought now would be a good time to think about what I’d like to see from online services in the next 12 months. For me at least, the answer is consolidation. The main online services I use today are: GMail (email), Google Reader (RSS reader), Google Maps (maps - obviously!), del.icio.us (bookmarks), Skype (phone calls), Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo (social networking), Dopplr and Plazes (where am I), MyMileMarker (fuel consumption tracking - yeah sad I know), Geni (Genealogy), Yahoo Messenger (instant messaging), plus with my new camera (Canon 400D which has arrived while writing this post 
) I am sure Flickr (photos) will get added to this list.
Although each service is focussed on something different, all of these services have a number of things in common:
- A user id and password
- One or more profiles
- A contact list
- A page containing recent updates
- Current status
In 2008 I would like to think we will see consolidation in these areas so I can have a single user id and password, a single set of profiles (e.g. professional and personal) under my control which I can choose to share with online services (i.e. I enter my information once), a single contact list, and a portal containing all the recent updates from my friends who are using these, and other, online services.
Single User ID, Password and Profiles
OpenID (and OAuth) already go someway to addressing this (although you currently still need a user id and password as well). These are relatively new technologies but quickly being adopted - Plaxo, Dopplr, MyMileMarker and sites such as Technorati already support them and there are rumours Google are going to do so too. Come on Google, get your act together and support OpenID then the rest of the big players will no doubt follow suit
Contact List
Most online services nowadays provide a way of importing your contacts from your address book so you can at least find friends who may be using the online service in question, however this is typically only done when you sign up and so is static. Your contact list is dynamic, you meet new friends and colleagues all the time, so what you need is something that keeps your single contact list in sync with all of the online services you use. Plaxo goes some way to doing this and is my online service of choice, although it is far from perfect (see Andrew’s recent blog post and subsequent comments), and is not helped by Google and Facebook not opening up your contacts/friends list for syncing with other online services. If Plaxo could sync with GMail and Facebook, then I would pretty much have a single contacts list so come on Google and Facebook, open up and let people sync their contact data, it is theirs afterall!
A page containing recent updates
Plaxo Pulse, Google Reader, Facebook home page, etc. etc. are just some of the pages I visit regularly to look for information updates from sites I am interested in, and also information from my contacts. Plaxo Pulse does the best job of information from my contacts provided that person is already a Plaxo member - I can add a simple connection and then see the information the connection wants to share with me, e.g. blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos etc. The only problem is that it is down to the connection to define what things I can see, even if they are public. For instance, if friend A decides to share their blog posts with me but not their public Flickr photos, I won’t see those in Plaxo Pulse and have no way of adding this in even though I can easily go and view these directly at the site. Facebook’s home page is another solution, although this quickly gets polluted with junk such as advertising, zombie requests, etc. although I notice you can now customise this much more (as you can with Plaxo) which should get rid of much of this.
Current status
Many of these services also have a notion of current status, e.g. online/offline, your current location, a short message about what you are doing/feeling. Some of these are integrated, e.g. Plazes allows you to share your current location as your Skype status which is really useful although it would be nice to have a single online status message which I can update and then have the option to share my current location with people.
Here’s hoping we see some consolidation in these areas next year - just imagine how much time you would save having a single user id and password, a single set of profiles, a single contact list, a single page of recent updates and a single status message!
Let me know what you would like to see from online services in 2008.