It’s the end of the year, and it’s the time for journalists all over the world to embarrass themselves by giving out predictions for the following year which will eventually turn out to be completely false. Who am I to break this wonderful tradition? Here are my predictions for the development of everything Web 2.0 related in the year 2007:

1. Web 2.0 will not burst like the dot.com bubble. Many predict that the invasion of new web 2.0 services, 99% of which aren’t intrinsically monetized, must mean that these new startups will go public and/or get bought by big companies a lot and then the stock market will crash when the collective consciousness that the stock market is realizes that all these companies are worth nothing. I don’t think this will happen, and I give you one reason: Google AdSense. Pay-per-click advertising is now huge, and it earns a lot of money to a lot of people, and it reduces the need to gather money for growth by going public. Web 2.0 startups can make money as soon as they start building traffic. Secondly, the market learns (slowly, but it learns), and it won’t over valuate internet companies twice in such a short period in time, or at least not to the same extent.

2. Everyone, and I mean everyone, will add links to social content sites on their pages. New York Times was one of the first big mainstream news websites that did it, adding links to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine, and other big sites will follow. The reason is simple: vast amounts of traffic.

3. Microsoft will become a lot less relevant. Microsoft is a slow learner when it comes to the web - just look at Internet Explorer. It’s moving in the Web 2.0 direction, but if Google is a cheetah running from the ice age, then Microsoft is a mastodon, stumbling clumsily and falling behind. The tactics of delivering apps with your world-dominating OS to achieve market advantage will not work any more, because the playground is now the web and it’s much bigger than one tiny little OS. I’m not saying people will stop using Windows; I’m saying they will simply care about it much less. There is the slight chance that Microsoft will pick up speed and start thinking different (no pun intended), however when I look at Zune, or IE7, I’m not really convinced they have what it takes to leap forward (and it’s leaps, not steps, they need).

4. Security will (again) become the #1 issue. Although everyone knows that security is an important issue whatever you do, enthusiasm about moving to the wonderful new world of web 2.0 has prevailed and people have somehow forgot that their precious data is more and more often stored online and as such vulnerable to all kinds of privacy & security problems. The more serious we all are about Web 2.0, the more serious we will be about making sure our data on the web is secure and private.

5. A new breed of social content sites will emerge. If 2006. was the year of Digg, then 2007. will be the year of fixing Digg. Every day new I see criticisms of the way stories are pushed to Digg’s front page, even on Digg itself. On the other hand, automatic news sources like Techmeme, Megite, and Tailrank, have been growing, however they are embraced mostly by IT professionals and lack the virality and crowd support (and thus the traffic and importance) of Digg. In 2007., I expect new services (or equivalent changes in the current services) which will bring us content through a combination of crowd wisdom, smart algorithms and live editors.

6. Hundreds of Web 2.0 companies will fade away. We’ve reached the Web 2.0 tipping point in 2006. Unfortunately, it created and will continue to create so much competition that making some choices will become necessary. And once one company goes big, competitors get washed away. It won’t cause the stock market to crash, but it will make investors more cautious.

7. A mini-boom of social content sites will happen. As content management systems which offer out-of-the-box social content functionality, like Pligg or SuperGu, get more and more advanced, users will create thousands of mini-Diggs. I expect the vast majority of these to be focused around a certain - possibly quite narrow - topic, and I see less than 1% of them actually gaining a big following. If you’re interested why, read my analysis here.

8. Term web 3.0 is going to get pushed a lot every time a new, interesting service appears. This trend has already started, and it will surely continue throughout 2007. Although experts have been struggling to define what Web 2.0 is, the world is hungry for Web 3.0 already. People like big numbers, that’s all.

9. Google will release its online operating system - GoogleOS. And I base this on absolutely nothing. OK, there is one hint in this direction: competition is rising fast. If Google plans to release a similar product and connect all their online services into one whole, they better do it fast.

10. Synchronization, organization and syndication will be the buzzwords of 2007. Everything is on the web. And almost everything already exist in its web 2.0 form. For example, instead of the old static application for storing and organizing your photos you now have a living, breathing entity consisting of information and connections between its users called Flickr. However, all information was not created equal. YouTube and Flickr and Writely and del.icio.us and Gmail aren’t exactly compatible. Now it’s time to figure out a way to access all that stuff from one place and share entire organized structures of data among users. Instead of sharing a video, users will want share their whole collection of music videos, concert photos and lyrics that go with them, with one click. I’ll name one company that goes in this direction: Netvibes and its ecosystem. As far as synchronization goes, check out Sharpcast, which Read/Write Web chose to be the most perspective little Web 2.0 company of 2007. Related to this, I expect major upgrades to the RSS standard (Google has already been dabbling with it, creating some of their own variants).

So there you go - I may have gotten it all wrong, but it was fun. A couple more predictions which aren’t directly (or are they?) related to Web 2.0: Firefox will continue to gain market share because it’s, simply, still better than IE7. Many new MMORPGs will appear, and some of them are bound to gain a big following when WoW starts waning at the end of 2007. And people will continue to talk about mobile web 2.0 as the next big thing, although the sheer fact that screens of mobile devices are too small to do most web-related tasks will continue to prove them wrong. Feel free to bash my choices or add new ones in the comments!