Deflexion.com

In this blog item, Rajesh Jain said "I will be doing a Tech Talk series at the end of the year on some of the important technology developments of 2003 and looking ahead to 2004. Your feedback is invited on what you think are the most important technologies that are shaping up." Here is
an annotated version of
the reply that I posted in his comments (my annotations are in square brackets).

Hi Rajesh, Here are some things that I think really took off in 2003:



* IMAP



* Server-side fee-based email filtering (for viruses and spam)



* Bayesian filtering of all types of data (i.e., not just for spam/non-spam separation)



* The Mozilla Project



* Gmane.org and the rebirth of NNTP in general



* CSS, XHTML, PHP



* Getting open-source work done by offering bounties such as the ones at www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html.
[Bounties are also used to get questions answered. For examples see answers.google.com, the message
procmail script willing to pay,
and answersquad.com. ]



* Moving away from Microsoft (this is reflected in MSFT stock price which has not moved up with the rest of the market)



* Individuals moving away from maintaining their own web or email servers because the overhead is too great.
[By "overhead" I mean the never-ending work of fighting spam, viruses, worms, distributed denials of service, etc.]



* Blogs and Syndication (but you already know that!)

Update:   I thought of some more "important technology developments":

• Secure connections have finally arrived. For example, Macromedia is now (finally) shipping Dreamweaver with an SFTP client.


• Remotely hosted disk space is cheap -- this happened in 2003 but not all hosting providers have figured out they need to do this.
  I spent all of 2003 tracking providers on my IMAP Service Providers page and watched prices fall and disk space & other services rise.


• Most people, including professional web site maintainers, will maintain web sites using blogging-type tools -- this will happen in 2004.


• WebDAV -- this will arrive in 2004, thanks in part to Apple and Macromedia

I've never done predictions like this before and it's pretty fun! Here's a wild one: Google will not go public because the founders don't want to and they will have the guts to stand up to the venture capitalists and say "No, this would destroy Google."





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