[Update: This post was supposed to make it out before the end of 2007, but it looks like I'm too late.. so.. let's have a review-2007 post as my first post of 2008!]

Hey, we’ve come to the end of 2007. So before we move on into a brand new year, full of expectation and promise, let’s take a little look back on the year gone by. Some thoughts, some comments on the bits of tech news that have surfaced in 2007.. and hey, 2007 review posts are all the rage anyway. =)

And.. in no particular order…

• Battle of the OSes : Vista, Linux and Leopard

I like to start off with this topic here because we’ve seen this battle rage on the past years, with enthusiasts from all three camps (yes people, Linux can be considered a ‘major’ OS now) arguing till the cows come home that “My OS is better!”. 2007 was a good year for all arguments since we’ve seen major releases from all three sides (well ok, the Linux camp has had ‘major’ releases for various distros almost every year, but the release of Vista and Leopard in 2007 just managed to put it all in context.).

Starting off the year, we saw Vista launch to the public on Jan 30, after an initial business-only launch in November 2006. Compared to the launch of XP more than 6 years ago, the Vista launch seemed rather lacklustre. Sporting the brand new Aero GUI, Microsoft’s tag line for the new release was “The WOW starts Now!“. But it would seem to Chris Pirillo, founder of Lockergnome and tech conference Gnomedex, that the line was probably closer to “The WOW starts How?“. And it would seem that Chris was not the only one facing problems with Vista, as many blogs started claiming that performance in XP was actually better than that of Vista, even prompting Microsoft to offer free downgrades to XP for Vista Ultimate and Vista Business users (let’s not even talk about the irony of getting a free downgrade to a ‘lesser’ version of Windows after you purchase the most expensive version of Vista as being a plus point here). Opinions of XP-vs-Vista and related benchmarks can be found aplenty of the great Web, so I’ll be lazy leave it as an exercise for the reader to go seek those out on your own =)

From the Apple camp, we saw the next release of the next big cat, Leopard. This release of OSX heralded the arrival of a great number of new features, including Spaces, TimeMachine, and the Zettabyte Filesystem. The use of multiple workspaces, introduced as Spaces in Leopard, has of course been a familiar concept amongst Linux users for quite a while before the release of Leopard, but hey, anything that improves productivity like multiple workspaces definitely does deserve a pat on the back! Unfortunately, what was to be the the big cat’s glorious release, was soon marred by reports of users having problems either upgrading from Tiger, and even on a cleanly installed system. Despite this though, Leopard users still seem to be happy with the new release and there doesn’t seem to be quite an uproar about its performace as compared to its cousin from Redmond.

While 2007 was not so much an outstanding year for the Linux and Open Source community (and not to say that they haven’t been doing good though, it’s just that it’s been just good all along =), we had a chance to compare newly released versions of Ubuntu and Fedora with that eye-candy suite Compiz-Fusion built right in, in a head-to-head fight with Microsoft’s Aero and Apple’s consistent GUI yumminess. If anything, I’d say Linux desktop-bling was given a tremendous boost by the merging of the Compiz and Beryl projects into Compiz-Fusion. Not only did the merge make the effort a lot more consolidated, it was easier for distros to package the Fusion packages and make them available through their repositories, which in turn made the bling more accessible to end-users. Furthermore, distros that included the Compiz-Fusion packages by default, like Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon definitely took a right step in making Linux more palatable to the masses. Also, do check out the Rants section of Episode 65 of the Linux Action Show podcast (Thanks Ram for introducing me to the podcast!) to hear why feature lists like “GNOME 2.20, X.Org 7.3 etc etc” seen in Linux distro release notes DO NOT turn people on as much as “Brand new transparency effect!”. [So now, Linux users, while you spin your 3D desktop-cubes, wobble your windows and switch between multiple desktops and windows with Exposé-/Coverflow-/Flip3d-like ease, do remember not to smirk as you attract stares of envy =p.]

2007 has definitely been a great year for the OS, with great improvements made in all three camps (yes, I said all three). But as performance issues with Vista, bugs with Leopard, and the neverending stream of “How do I do X with Linux??” questions, it just shows how far we are from a system that truly does, Just Work.

• Apple’s iPhone

The ‘other’ great product from the great (what used to be) technicolour fruit-based company in 2007 is the iPhone. Known to some as the ‘Jesusphone’, the iPhone promised to be “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device” as introduced by Steve Jobs at the MacWorld Expo in Jan 2007. The Apple iPhone was the first in the world to introduce a multitouch interface, enabling users to navigate the phone’s functions with just their fingers. [Check out the iPhone demo videos on Apple.com] The almost unbearable sleekness of the iPhone, combined with its über-cool touch interface simply rocked the world when the it was first announced.

However, the hype ended up having a huge barrel of ice-cold water poured down its pants when it was noted that although the iPhone was announced at the Expo in January, the iPhone itself wouldn’t be shipping at least until the second half of the year (which it did, on 29 June). Unfortunately, this also meant that competitors had about 6 whole months to come up with a device to challenge the iPhone. True, the pretenders could not expect to sway the true believers of the Jobsian Cult, but other pundits were certain that Steve Jobs had blown his January keynote. And just to be sure that things were nice and chilly, Apple further announced that the iPhones were only to be sold with a 2-year (voice and data) contract with AT&T. Later in the year, further exclusive carriers for the iPhone in the EU were also announced.

So, while Asia awaits the iPhone (due in 2008), what’s the reaction been like? Here’s mrbrown’s take on it. Check out some other more enterprising ’solutions’. Speculation has already started in the local forums as to which telco will get to carry the iPhone when it arrives in Singapore, so the fever looks like it’s building up nicely here as well.

So is the iPhone truly the ‘Jesusphone’? I’d tend to disagree, even though TIME Magazine has declared the iPhone the Invention of the Year. Personally, I’d like a device with a slightly more open development platform, like Maemo of the Nokia Internet Tablets. Not that I wouldn’t use an iPhone if you gave me one ;), but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get one, that’s all. [Oh, and check out the iPhone Musical by David Pogue]

• Facebook — of Sheep and Beacon

Facebook was about the only company that was constantly in the news in tech circles (and beyond) for most of 2007. From the launching of the Facebook Developer Platform, to their rejection of Yahoo!’s $1.4 billion offer, to their acceptance of Microsoft’s 1.6%, $240 million offer (at a valuation of $15 billion), to the Beacon privacy fiasco, this definitely has been a busy year for the young company and its young founders.

After the launch of the Facebook platform and absolute explosion of entertaining, but seriously useless applications, we began to see the first signs of Facebook application fatigue. Bloggers like Jason Calacanis and Fred Wilson began complaining of the supreme multitude of Facebook application clamouring incessantly for their attention. People began adding stuff to their profiles that simply clogged it up. I even remember a post on my friend’s wall that said “Dude, I took over a minute to find your wall!”. As a result, it seemed that Facebook had lost some of its original charm and simplicity, and had wandered drunkenly close to MySpace’s wantonness. [Check out this profile with 200 apps, created courtesy of Mashable]

Apart from being a media darling, Facebook was an investment darling too. With Microsoft’s investment placing the privately-owned company at a $15 bn valuation (seriously, wtf?). I’m no savvy investor, and I’m no great fan of Facebook either, so I don’t really grok the magnitude of the valuation. Yeah sure, I use Facebook. I poke my friends and I throw sheep with the best of them. But hey, I don’t need a website to keep in touch with my friends. Call me old fashioned perhaps, but when I want to catch up with my friends, I give them a call and we go for a coffee or lunch. Which would you rather? Munch on some real livestock with a friend or throw virtual ones at them? Sure, Facebook is fun, but it’s not going to change the world. There’s no new tech behind the company, and all that ties it together are its users. Take the users away, then ask, where’s the value?

And speaking of users, Facebook learnt that trying too hard to capitalise on its user base wasn’t too good an idea. With the Beacon system displaying traces of users’ online activities outside of Facebook on their newsfeeds, Facebook started to seriously creep people out. Facebook’s Beacon received loads of backlash, tarnishing the gleaming sheen the company had painstakingly polished over the past months with its developer platform. Security researchers even analysed Beacon’s behaviour, finding that the system still sent details of users’ activities back to Facebook even though they were logged out of the social network. Sites like Consumerist even posted tips on how to counter Beacon. However, despite the uproar, reports emerged that the protests against Beacon came only from a small, but very vocal portion of the online community instead of the majority. Well, after calls from the blogosphere to repent, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg finally did post an apology on the company’s corporate blog apologising for the Beacon fiasco. However, even that was not enough for bloggers like Om Malik, who claimed that the apology (and related changes to the Beacon system) did not sufficiently deal with certain concerns, namely the transmission of data to Facebook itself.

When it comes to privacy issues, I think it’s not so much what the company does, but how transparent it is with its users, and how much perceived control users have over their data. For example, in the case of Beacon, had Facebook announced the system to users in the first place, allowing them to opt out (and I mean really opt out, not a don’t-notify-me-when-my-data-is-sent kind of ‘opt-out’) of the system, or at least control which Beacon items got published, my guess is that quite a number of users would have left the system to do its work. After all, the News Feed was already a common concept, and Beacon would just appear to be another source for News Feed items, instead of a perceived privacy breach.

• Rise of the tumble/microblogs

In the world of blogging/tumblelogging/microblogging, I especially liked the Twitter/Jaiku competition this year. Though both services are pretty similar, I personally feel that Jaiku does have an edge over the competition, summed up in a previous post. Google’s eventual acquisition of the Finnish-based Jaiku, led to widespread speculation in the blogosphere as to why the seemingly less popular (in terms of users) service was chosen by the Big G. I tried contributing my 2 cents
on the issue as well.

And with the other players in the sub-blogging (Hey! New term!) arena, Pownce and Tumblr encountered slightly different fates. Tumblr managed to raise $750k in Series A funding, while the unfortunate Pownce has all but dropped off the radar, even having to suffer being dug at (pun, sort of, not entirely, intended) by uncov.com.

Still, apart from getting people to answer (and answer, and answer, and answer) the question of what they are currently doing, microblogging services (especially Jaiku’s channels), found themselves used as backchannels for conferences such as Reboot in Denmark and Hej! 2007 and Hubbub 07 in Stockholm.

• Google Rising: Android and OpenSocial

And of course, which year would be complete without some news from Big G itself? After losing the Facebook partnership deal to rival, Microsoft, Google quietly let exuberance work itself for a few days before announcing that it, too, was doing the API thing. The only thing is, Google was going this alone. OpenSocial turned out to be a general set of APIs that partner sites would implement in order to allow OpenSocial applications (similar to Facebook applications) to be embedded in profiles across said partner sites. As it turned out, Google had already lined up a series of partners before the announcement, including Ning, friendster, LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Hi5 and orkut, among others, leaving Microsoft and Facebook pretty much sitting along on the ‘other side’.

Initial reactions included those saying that despite all the partners Google had lined up, their combined traffic still couldn’t top that of Facebook’s. However, with the announcement that social networking giant (in network-traffic terms) MySpace was joining the OpenSocial coalition, the situation was now reversed. And while many hailed the OpenSocial coalition as a “Facebook-killer”, others were just not convinced that Facebook was caught dead in the water.

However, despite the initial hype, it would appear that Google’s OpenSocial hasn’t taken off the ground yet. And its partners are getting impatient. In the past month, two members of the initial OpenSocial alliance, Bebo and LinkedIn, have announced plans to release their own API platforms ahead of OpenSocial, with Bebo even partnering with OpenSocial rival-apparent, Facebook. If anything, I’d say this is a sign that Google had better start cracking on OpenSocial to get it off the ground. True, it’s a coalition, but that doesn’t mean Google can sit idly by and wait for developers to flock to OpenSocial on their own. Surely, there has to be a push from Google itself to get things going? Coalition members are standing by. Wait any longer, and OpenSocial might end up being just another might-have-been in the grand scheme of things. I’m eager to see how things play out with this. Will OpenSocial eventually become the social application platform of choice, or will Facebook retain it’s popularity?

The other big piece of news from Google in 2007, was that after taking on the social networking sphere, it was slowing easing itself into the mobile arena. Just shortly after the announcement of the OpenSocial platform, Google released yet another piece of news that rocked the world. The fabled gPhone was here. Only it wasn’t a gPhone at all. Analysts at the New York Times speculated that Google was in fact working on a reference implementation of software for a mobile platform, which would then compete with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. As it turned out, they were right.

Google’s mobile platform, Android, was based on Andy Rubin’s work at the company of the same name, acquired by Google in 2005. Similar to OpenSocial though, the Android scene has been pretty quiet in the weeks after the announcement, though the Google Blog post announcing Android did mention that some partners in Google’s Open Handset Alliance were aiming to ship Android-based phones in the second half of 2008. At this time though, pictures of Android prototypes have begun to appear online.

What will the first Android-based mobile look like? I’m sure that’s a question we’re all asking ourselves. But more importantly, what impact will a mobile phone linked to Google have? Will it be the cause for privacy concerns all over again? Will we begin to see contextual ads on our gPhones in relation to where we physically are? We shall see.

–

2007 has been a year of great news and great develops, in almost all sectors of the internet industry. From new OS releases, to new developer platforms, strategic alliances and entire new industries (RockYou, I’m looking at you) have been created. At the same time, we’ve also begun to catch glimpses of a potential Bubble 2.0, with people jumping aboard the ‘Web 2.0′ bandwagon without quite understanding what it meant.

2007 has been cool and we’re hoping 2008 will hold many more exciting surprises. But lest we begin feeling bubbly again, I leave you with this amusing, yet rather poignant post.