I was looking at my 2006 predictions today, and find that they were mostly correct, but that they lacked audacity. The predictions were:

  1. The mindshare of Ruby on Rails will grow relative to other Web application platforms, in spite of the efforts of devotees of other platforms to come up with their own Rails alternatives. I have a theory about why this is that I’ll elaborate in another post.

* Identity theft by way of stealing databases of personal information will continue to grow explosively. I think there’s still plenty of low hanging fruit out there for fraudsters and I think that this year we’ll see the back ends of large Web sites get hacked and see their customer databases stolen by fraudsters. * Wikipedia still won’t be accepted by the academic and journalistic mainstream. The way wikis operate is counterintuitive enough that the establishment will reject it even though it’s obvious that it basically works. * JavaScript will be bigger than ever. The trend toward pushing functionality back from the server to the client that got rolling in 2005 will continue to grow. Hopefully Internet Explorer 7 will be good enough to fuel this trend. * The blog phenomenon continues apace. I don’t have a specific blog-related prediction, but my guess is that we’ll continue to see more big Web sites add blog-like features, and that more people will try to make their living writing blogs. The raw number of blogs will continue to grow explosively. (I guess I’d say that blogging is a trend, not a fad.)

Let’s rate them:

  1. Ruby on Rails has really taken off, and frameworks that seek to capitalize on/head off the Ruby on Rails momentum have been in the works. Thanks in large part to the release of Mongrel, a better tool for deploying Rails applications, Ruby on Rails has done very well.

* Most of the big identity theft stories for the year were about database theft, however, most were of the traditional lost/stolen laptop variety. This UCLA database hack is more in line with what I predicted. * Probably mostly correct. Wikipedia is bigger and better than ever, but the mainstream does still seem to be dubious about it. That said, I see Wikipedia being cited now more than ever to settle arguments. * 2006 was a banner year for JavaScript. So much so that I think this prediction scores 9/10 for obviousness. * Correct, but obvious. The fact that the Economist has launched a blog and hired a well-known blogger to edit it pretty much says it all.

Not bad for my first set of predictions. I’ll try to come up with some predictions for 2007 next week.