During 2009, I left Elgg, the project I’d been developing for five years, and concentrated on real-world contracts and projects. I spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and met some very interesting people who are going to provide a new model for news reporting in America. I’ve been working with them for the rest of the year, and look forward to writing some more about that project soon.

I’ve also been working with a local publisher in Oxford, creating GeoRSS feeds for their content and paving the way for a mashup with the official University of Oxford mobile site. Imagine walking around your hometown, seeing rooms and apartments for rent displayed on an augmented reality browser, superimposed on the streets themselves. It’s just one way that the web is meeting simple, real-world needs with innovative approaches that are quickly beginning to resemble science fiction. Data is being mashed up and made available in increasingly sophisticated ways.

I expect mobile to come into its own in 2010, particularly now that the mobile Internet market is projected to be twice the size of its desktop cousin. Augmented reality and applications like RedLaser are the more obvious manifestations of this, but I expect the nature of web publishing as a whole to subtly morph. Platforms like WordPress are beginning to recognize this in small ways, such as adding native support for the Twitter API, but expectations are being set far higher than this.

Hardware like the iPhone, the assorted Android handsets and smartphones like the Palm Pre are very affordable multimedia all-rounders which have turned ubiquitous connectivity into a mass-market feature. People are going to expect to be able to save any digital content from anywhere, and share it with anyone. In 2010, I intend to help them.

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Of course, Automattic also own Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress, which is fast becoming a solid competitor in the open source social networking market. I’ve seen people have some installation difficulties with it (it’s apparently been simplified to a 13 step process), so it would make some sense to include it as an optional piece of functionality out of the box. But most importantly, I think there’s a change in progress, illustrated by the Google Wave announcement yesterday but not represented in this announcement.

Communities are forming around users, not users around communities.

In the web application model we’ve been using for the last fifteen years or so, you would install a piece of facilitative software in order to create a web community. That might be forum software or Microsoft Sharepoint depending on needs and context, but they’re both centralized communities. The user visits them to log in and participate; users swarm around a single community access point.

However, consider Skype. It’s not a web tool, but it’s often considered to be one of the new breed of applications. When you want to share something here, a community is automatically created between users, who can then have text discussions, call each other and share files – not dissimilar activities to those you might find on centralized communities like Sharepoint, but with the following advantages:

• It’s transient: there’s no need for the community to exist for longer than it has to.
• There’s no effort involved. Once you’re done with a community, you simply close the communication (but a backup is typically kept, so you can come back and reference the activity).
• It’s private: it’s very hard to share activity with the wrong people.
• It’s decentralized: the community is physically hosted between all the involved parties.

Google Wave also shares all these characteristics, and we’re going to see similar functionality crop up in a host of applications over the next year or two. The reason is simple: it’s a better way to communicate communally.

Of course, blogs are usually public entities, and in that sense WordPress Multi User does its job. But it’s tough keeping track of comment discussions, and there’s no elegant way to have a private, communal blog – something that intranet software needs and that tools like Elgg have done very well for years (disclaimer: I co-founded it). But even that sticks to a centralized model, and eventually, those ad hoc, transient communities are going to be everywhere. It’s going to be interesting to see how tools like WordPress evolve to cope.

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