Small Initiatives

At the start of 2004, I made several predictions about the Internet design landscape in my newsletter (which will resume publication soon, I assure you).

Looking back on all that happened in the world last year, they seem quaint by comparison. Still, one can't make predictions if one isn't prepared to own up to them, so let's review my 2004 forecasts, shall we?

CAN-SPAM: I said the then-new CAN-SPAM law would not be as successful as supporters hoped, nor as awful as critics feared.

That sounds about right.

CAN-SPAM didn't do much to restrain junk mail, by anyone's measure. And it caused legitimate e-mail marketers some initial pain to figure out how to comply.

Still, as Steve Yelvington observes, CAN-SPAM is good for the e-marketing industry because it sets standards for business practices and consumer privacy regarding e-mail as a communications medium.

So why do we still have so much junk mail? Because when spam is outlawed, only outlaws will spam.

E-mail: I predicted e-mail would not be supplanted as a content or marketing distribution medium.

It hasn't.

This little prognostication aimed at the rise of RSS for syndicating headlines, links and summary content. I kept reading about how RSS could be an effective alternative to e-mail for content providers to distribute newsletters.

I still don't see RSS itself as distribution in the same sense as e-mail. But my opinion may change as more e-mail style client software follows the Mozilla Thunderbird example: integrating RSS feeds with e-mail instead of with Web browsing activity.

Regardless, RSS seems far from mainstream consumer adoption. I love it, but it still feels pretty geeky to me.

Blogs: I said the number of actively maintained Weblogs would not continue to grow at as rapid a pace in 2004 as in the preceding 18 months.

I missed this one, mostly. Technorati now tracks 5.4 million blogs, and that number has grown by millions in the past year.

I still think a peak in new Weblog creation is due, and I still believe the number of actively maintained blogs grows much more slowly. It's insanely easy to fire up a new blog, but much harder to keep it running as weeks, months, years go by.

Internet Explorer stagnation: I predicted Web standards and semantics advocates would not win much new ground against Microsoft.

Right-o! Internet Explorer ages gracelessly, in terms of compatibility and security. And the next prospect for a major upgrade appears to be the Longhorn release of Windows, due in 2006.

But that scenario allowed the faster-than-expected rise of Mozilla Firefox, and that's a good thing for designers and developers.

Except, that is, to the extent that we have to accommodate multiple platforms and work around IE's many quirks. That annoyance won't go away soon.