I can't recall a year where the technological center of gravity was more personal-facing -- and less business-oriented -- than 2008. Sure, virtualization, server consolidation, SaaS, and enhanced mobility emerged as offering true enterprise value. Yet many of us spent our days messing around with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all the while convincing ourselves that we were doing it out of a selfless desire to benefit our employers!
I admit I engaged in some of that "me" stuff, too. Which is not to say that there isn't real business value to be extracted from social networking. Indeed there is, especially when you're talking about subjective and hard-to-measure qualities like brand-building and online presence.
OK, enough with the set up already. When I look back at the stuff I've worked on in 2008, I'm surprised to find I've covered a heck of a lot of ground. Part of this is that fact that Internet time is like dog years -- each week is equivalent to a month in the old days; boy, it's tiring. Mainly, though, there was lot of interesting stuff in 2008 which merited attention, both because of its intrinsic value and because of the potential career advantages which can accrue by keeping on the cutting edge. (Not to mention, the sagging economy is inspiring everyone who's gainfully employed to work harder.)
Here now (finally) is my list of top nine personal tech accomplishments for 2008:
Set up a Joomla site. As I explained in "Joomla Rocks, Or How To Build A Professional Web Site For No Money Down," open-source content-management systems like Joomla and Drupal are the wave of the Web 2.0 future. These tools make it possible for anybody to launch a professional Web site in no time at all.
More important (ominously?), they disintermediate the software-development organizations which previously provided a big advantage to well-funded companies. Warning to big companies -- your next competitor could be two kids who are developing the heck out of their site, while your people are still stuck in planning meetings.
Got on the Twitter bandwagon. (Follow my tweets here.) While Twitter is fun, I actually believe it can have real business value. Dell, for one, reportedly extracted an additional $1 million in revenue through its use of Twitter to inform interested consumers of special deals and new products. Here at InformationWeek, we've been using Twitter to give readers a heads-up on new content. Many editors here also have their own accounts, from which they're sending into the online mix either that unique mix of need-to-know business tweets or useless-but-fun personal asides, which microblogging so aptly enables.
Built a bitchn' quad-core PC with Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Too tired to write about it again; watch the video:
Built a bunch of Facebook apps. These were fairly simple re-spins of existing RSS feeds, but they got me started as a bona fide FB developer. Plus, one of them -- the InformationWeek Blog Update -- has more than 500 users. (Of course, today it's not working; I think Dapper.net's down. Diving in to fix them now; a developer's work is never done.)
Installed Windows 7, which is Microsoft's upcoming successor to Vista. It's only in pre-beta now, but, boy, is it looking like it's going to be Redmond's most successful offering since. . . Windows XP. Check out the screenshots.
Dived into smartphones. Here's a bullet point which spans the personal-work divide. As I explored in the piece, "Is The Smartphone Your Next Computer?", BlackBerrys, iPhones, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices are beginning to take on heavy-duty tasks beyond simply e-mail. Look for real advances in 2009 in the way the workforce uses mobile access to serious corporate apps.
Got an iPhone. OK, I'm just trying to get another bullet point here. (I could have folded this into the previous item.) Still, if you're going to write about smartphones, you have to have experience with Apple's device. Though I'm still a big Blackberry fan. While we're on the subject of the iPhone, here's another video:
Learned how to admin a Clearspace site. This is the second leg in the content-management-unleashed objective I've set for myself, and began with the Joomla test site I set up earlier this year. I saw demos of both Clearspace and SocialText earlier this year at the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston. Our own Tom Smith has worked with Clearspace in more detail, setting up an instance, and I've learned about it by becoming one of the admins. Believe me when I say this stuff is the wave of the future. (But you don't have to believe me, you can check out CNN iReport, which is Clearspace-powered but looks like a normal site, because it's got a customized user-interface in place of the out-of-the-box CS interface.
Time for another video, this one on Socialtext, which is more for internal corporate Wikis, as opposed to Clearspace, which is both for wikis and for outward-facing Web sites:
Pondered the existential meaning of Web 2.0. OK, this isn't a technical accomplishment. Still, it's an activity which I find just as valuable (more, really) than updating my Facebook and LinkedIn pages. The short version is I believe that social networks could take over the functions currently provided by media companies (i.e., keeping people in touch with what's going on. Also, mobile is the new desktop, as in smartphones will soon displace laptops. (See "Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies" for the full post.)
OK, that's it for me; couldn't stretch my list to 10. I'm outta here. Have a great holiday; see you in 2009.
What did you do in 2008? Let me know, by leaving a comment below or e-mailing me directly at alex@alexwolfe.net.
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