On the Floor

Here at factor[e], we're not just design and web professionals.  We're also futurists, always several steps ahead of the game when it comes to the technologies we so love.  With that in mind, here are our predictions for the Internet in 2009.  Happy New Year from all of us here at factor[e]!

1. Facebook and MySpace expand into the antisocial-networking space, launching a new site where you start off as friends with everybody and have to get rid of them.
2. Upon its release, Internet Explorer 8 is fully standards compliant and passes the Acid3 test.  It is also completely incompatible with Windows Vista.
3. PHP is ported over to the JVM so that applications can be written in PHP which run using Java, similar to jRuby and Jython.  Enterprising PHP programmers jump on this new technology in order to write applications for mobile devices, causing many of them to lock up harder than a 30 GB Zune on New Year's Eve.  The technology, mockingly called jBug or Jamateur by professional programmers, is defunct by the end of the year.
4. David Heinemeier Hansson knee-drops Adrian Holovaty off the turnbuckle at the first and last 'Framework Smackdown' conference.
5. VRML will make a major comeback with the announcement of Facebook Telescreen, a new feature that allows partner sites to view virtual walk-throughs of your house, 24 hours a day.
6. Flickr, after the success of allowing people to upload 'long pictures', also allows users to upload short sounds. 2 months later this feature is removed as it is used mainly for fart noises.
7. The NSA releases a fleet of ultra advanced insect-size flying surveillance bots in order to keep a close eye on the activities of American citizens.  The bots become a favourite meal of crows, which soon start hanging out near falafel restaurants and Code Pink meetings.
8. The CSS3 advanced layout module to allow tighter control over column layouts is finalized. Microsoft introduces the Advanced Internet Layouts Professional Edition 2009 module, which opens 6 new security holes and only works in IE6.
9. Wordpress is edged out by Xanga as the number one blogging platform for web professionals and political analysts.
10. The MPAA files suit against a 3-year-old, a lumber yard and a dolphin for downloading Blu-Ray rips of "You Don't Mess with the Zohan".
11. Gradients and drop shadows become a thing of the past in web design trends, being fully replaced by checkerboard and magic-eye backgrounds.
12. Yahoo! and Hotmail combine their webmail services to offer users the ability to store a whopping 12 gigabytes of CiALi$ spam.