Long Shots for 2008

So we made it, 2008 is 2 days old and here is my obligatory preview of the year. The year started well for me with fireworks over San Francisco which are visible from my apartment building. As you can see, the emerald tower (The Infinity – Luxury condominiums) blocked the view somewhat but we were still able to enjoy them. Now I don’t gamble much because I am spectacularly bad at it, I can’t resist that 500-1 outsider, even though I know it will never win I can’t resist that value. So in that spirit here are my long shot predictions for 2008 in no particular order:

1) Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, reddit and all the similar services will be bought, merge or become irrelevant.

I have been playing around with them and apart from Del.icio.us don’t find them helpful at all. What I want is feeds and access to my friend’s feeds and why do I want that in multiple places? I can either use my social networking tool of choice, such as facebook to monitor what my fiends are looking at and what they like. As the rise in social networks tells us, people care about what their friends and contacts are doing, we don’t care that 600 teenage girls digg some Justin Timberlake video (unless I am a teenage girl perhaps) so put the ‘diggs’ of my friends in facebook where everything else is thanks and that drives the ad revenue to facebook.

UPDATE: del.icios.us was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, let’s see what happens with the others if they are not already acquired – sorry for the oversight.

2) Amazon will buy Salesforce.com

I know Jake is predicting Google will buy them, but what about Amazon?