Home 2006 Web Technology Trends

2006 Web Technology Trends

It’s December already and so it’s about that time to reflect on what has happened in
Web Technology during 2006 – and ponder what 2007 may bring. Over the next few weeks
Read/WriteWeb is going to publish some in-depth posts analyzing the trends and new
products we’ve seen in 2006, as well as musing on some specific things we’ll probably see
in 2007.

To kick this series off, here is an overview of some high level trends from 2006. In
our next post, we’ll make predictions for 2007. We’re also looking for YOUR feedback, to
ensure that what we cover over the next few weeks is complete. 

I have to thank kiwi journalist Mark Evans for the inspiration for this series. Mark
recently had an article published in Management Magazine that outlined Web trends for
2006 and 2007. Mark interviewed me for that article and so this post (and the next) will
utilize much of the thinking I did to contribute to Mark’s article. Here goes…

2006 Review

– Undoubtedly 2006 has been the year of the social network. MySpace, YouTube,
Facebook have been the three outstanding success stories – but also impressive was Bebo
(in the UK particularly) and there was strong growth in existing web 2.0 networks like
Flickr and del.icio.us. The zenith of this social networking craze was probably Google buying
YouTube
for $1.65 B.

RSS continues to inch towards the mainstream – Yahoo integrated it into Y!
Mail Beta
, Microsoft is utilizing it more (e.g. integrated into IE7), Google came out
with Google Base and the GData format
(which is based on the RSS variant, ATOM). While 2006 can’t be seen as the breakthrough
year for RSS in the mainstream, we will probably see RSS bloom in 2007 as a result of the
groundwork done in ’06 by the big Internet companies. Note that there have been recent
murmurs that Yahoo is scaling
back
RSS, but I think this is a short-term trend only.

– 2006 was also the year that Web 2.0 got overhyped and the term is now
generally accepted as just a marketing term, akin to Dot Com. But whatever you call it –
I prefer to use the term ‘Social Web’ or even ‘read/write Web’ nowadays – this current
era of the Web is making a big impact. Mainstream media is taking on board many
read/write philosophies. This is evidenced in many ways – e.g. News Corp acquiring
MySpace and seeing enormous growth; blogs are now accepted by mainstream media and
businesses; etc. Also the overwhelming presence of media people at the 2006 Web 2.0
Summit
was evidence that Social Web trends are influencing a broader cross-spectrum
of people now.

– In 2006 Amazon came out with some startling new web technologies – Mechanical
Turk, S3 (online storage) and EC2. Their push to be a
major web services
infrastructure platform
was one of the more intriguing strategies from an Internet
bigco this year.

– On the other big companies… Google dominated the news and
buzz this year, Microsoft pushed ahead with
its Windows Live strategy (its Web-based suite of products and services), and
Yahoo had a steady product year (but ending with
organizational issues
). Apple continued to dominate the online music
market
(forcing Microsoft to compete
head-on
) and has also entered the video space with gusto.

– Lots of bigco partnering. Allow me to quote directly from Mark Evans here, as
he captured this trend very nicely: “Ebay and Yahoo have snuggled up together, announcing
in May that Yahoo would serve display ads to Ebay’s US users and promote Paypal
– Ebay’s payment service – to Yahoo users. In August, Ebay signed
Google to serve ads to international Ebay users. A dollar each way, perhaps?”

– 2006 also saw the return of the VC money (see web 2.0 hype above!). Although
VC money this
time round seems to be much more circumspect and generally lower valuations than in the
dot com boom. Indeed an associated trend is that web startups are increasingly going it
alone and bootstrapping, thanks to open source technologies (e.g. the LAMP platform) and
ability to work anywhere anytime. On the flip side (pardon the pun), it still pays to be
located in Silicon Valley – as that is where the key networking and fundraising activity
still takes place.

Localization really matters in Web space – for example TradeMe dominates New Zealand traffic and similar
local products often outrank the likes of Yahoo and Google in their local markets. The
larger trend here is that cultural and language differences mean that big US companies
don’t always dominate in international markets. Having said that, there is also a lot of
overseas cloning of
successful Silicon Valley apps (e.g. digg, flickr). See Read/WriteWeb’s continuing coverage of
international markets
for individual country drill-downs.

The consumerization of the enterprise has been an emerging trend all year.
More and more social web apps are coming into the enterprise (e.g. Skype, IM), and
organizations are adopting read/write Web philosophies. Corporate blogging got popular in
2006 and blogs are usually part of the mix now in marketing plans. 

– In particular, I’ve been tracking the trend of Web
Office
. As well as lots of startup action (Zoho, Zimbra, ThinkFree, et al), late
this year saw a flurry of action from Google in this space – Google Apps For Your Domain,
the acquisitions of Writely and JotSpot, the
launch of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and more. In 2007 a major area of focus will be
the increasing competition in office software between Google and Microsoft.

Widgets (mini web apps) were all the rage this year, culminating in its own
conference. Related to this, ‘personalized
start pages’
(live.com, netvibes, pageflakes, etc) ramped up, enabling users to
collect their widgets together on the one site.

Online video was hot, hot, hot this year! There are currently a host of YouTube wannabes on the market. The
best chance for success for all these startups vying for attention, is to either come out
with a next-generation product that takes online video functionality to the next level
and/or target a specific niche market.

VoIP spaceshowed signs of
hotting up. Skype now has a bunch of new competitors, all aiming to disrupt the existing
telecoms industry.

Hybrid web/desktop apps (or as Read/WriteWeb termed
it
“webified desktop apps”) came into play a lot more this year. For example the Times
Reader
, built using Microsoft WPF technology. Also noteworthy is Adobe’s
Apollo platform and Laszlo’s rich
internet apps platform.

Browser Wars 2.0. Firefox enjoyed strong growth this year and released its
2.0 browser in
October
. 2006 was also (not coincidentally) the year that Microsoft finally upgraded
its Internet Explorer browser, to 7.0.

– From a blog perspective, Techcrunch
established itself as the blog at the center of all the web 2.0 action – attracting
aspiring startups like moths around a flame.
Other tech blogs like Gigaom, VentureBeat and Read/WriteWeb itself, have also experienced
excellent growth this year.

Ajax had strong
growth
this year and according to some reports is not that far behind Flash now.

World
Internet Penetration
is 16% and growing – Asia in particular is ramping up fast!
Also noteworthy is that 3/4 of traffic to top
websites is international
.

Those were the major trends from the Web this year, but there are many other smaller
trends. Here is a starter for 10:

  • RSS
    filtering
    , while not as strong as I expected this year, is still making progress
    via very small startups. The new Google Reader also had some interesting filtering
    features. However PubSub carked
    it.
  • The commodization of RSS Readers – e.g. the Pluck Reader shut
    down
    .
  • P2P
    traffic
    continued to grow.
  • The WebOS (virtual desktop) was a relatively small market this year, but a lot
    of startups entered the
    space
    .
  • Digital
    Reading market hotted up
    – Microsoft, Sony and Adobe all released new e-reading
    products.
  • Asian
    Mobile Web years ahead
    – while the Mobile Web has a long way to go in places like the
    US and NZ, in Asia the mobile Web had continued growth in 2006.
  • e-learning had
    strong growth in 2006.
  • There was hot competition between blog
    vendors
    – e.g. SixApart vs WordPress
  • Innovative distributed portal plays are growing fast – e.g.
    edgeio, simplyhired.
  • ADD MORE IN THE COMMENTS…

As the final bullet point implies, so much more has happened in 2006 than I can hope
to cover in one post. So please add other 2006 Web trends to the comments. After all, the
only way this list is going to be comprehensive is via the Power of the Many 😉

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