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By Martin Belam

There is no doubt that the shockwaves following the financial collapse of some of the best known banks and financial institutions made 2009 a difficult year for nearly every enterprise on the planet. Indeed, there are few people who have a living memory of a worst recession. This has been a particular concern for the information sector, where cutting back on research, knowledge management and library skills look like easy 'soft' targets for efficiency.

And so, with that in mind, instead of dwelling on the year just gone, I thought I'd have a gaze into my crystal ball and optimistically see what I think 2010 will hold for those of us who publish and 'share' information for a living. Along the way I've been asking friends, colleagues, peers and FUMSI readers what their information sharing New Year's resolutions are...

The wave of the future?

One of the most keenly anticipated software releases in the information space was the 'preview' version of Google Wave (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html). A mash-up of email, instant messaging, video conferencing and well, just about every other established Internet communication tool, at the moment the service is available by invite only.

I've seen it written that the user interface to Wave is very confusing to adopt. However, it is not so much a single service Google are trying to build  as a whole communications protocol. I would anticipate seeing a lot of applications and bots built for the platform in the next year, expanding its capabilities. Sal Khan sees one of his goals for 2010 being 'connecting all my social media with Google Wave''.

Not everybody is interested in Google Wave, though. One of the New Year's Resolutions I collected at a recent London IA event was from Michael Lorek, and he stated that as far as collaboration was concerned: 'I am not interested in Google Wave'. For those of you who are, I'm happy to say that next month's FUMSI will feature a review of how people are finding it so far.

Microblogging everywhere - but a Twitter backlash is due in the media

There is no doubt that Twitter has been the new media darling of the year with the British press, and the micro-blogging platform has hit the mainstream with celebrity endorsement from the likes of Stephen Fry (http://twitter.com/STEPHENFRY) and political endorsement from the major parties on both sides of the Atlantic. In the coming year we can expect to see 'microblogging', 'status updates' and social messaging increasing bolted onto intranet platforms as a way of facilitating communication within enterprises.

In truth some areas of business have had this kind of communication going on for ages - I can remember at the BBC at the turn of the century that all the software developers across the whole of the business were connected on 'the talker', an IRC network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat) inside the corporation. Yammer  (https://www.yammer.com/) provides a similar standalone feature with a less geeky interface. At the same time as an explosion of interest within the enterprise, I expect to see the mainstream media fall out of love with Twitter and start hyping up the 'next big thing'.

Identity across the web

Another information trend that I think will become more and more noticeable over the next twelve months is issues around digital identity and privacy. I think this will be part of a continued trend that sees the lines between a home identity and a work identity blur.

Google recently introduced their 'privacy dashboard' (http://digbig.com/5barea), which gathers together on one page a list of everything that Google thinks it knows about you across their various services. In one sense it is a great example for other companies of 'what would Google do?' It is an uncluttered interface that gives the user a semblance of control over the data.

In another sense, looking at it for the first time is a sobering experience. Anyone with a significant digital footprint is liable to use several Google services, and to see that behavioral tracking laid out so starkly really brings home how much we rely on the people we give our data to behaving ethically and keeping it secure.

The issue of multiple identities will become more pressing. Already you can see people maintaining multiple Twitter accounts. One as their main Twitter feed, one for the weekend when they post about their hobbies rather than work, one for live-tweeting conferences to avoid swamping all their followers with the hashtag-laden disjointed fragments of text that spew out on those occasions.

As semantic websearch like sig.ma (http://sig.ma/) links more and more of our personal data together, people will want to feel in control of how those identities are joined. If you regularly help out on a forum for people recovering from having a drug addict in the family, do you really want machines to work out that this can be linked to your professional profile?

We'll carry on ignoring the phone and under-rating email

One trend that I expect to continue in 2010 is the over-excitement about new social sharing technologies overshadowing the fact that the telephone and email are also both social media, and ways of facilitating the sharing of knowledge. Jason Mesut's New Year resolution is to 'Give myself a slot in my day when I actually read my emails'.

Doing more with less. Doing less with more

When I asked people for their resolutions for the new year, a lot of them focus around doing more. Neil Challis, for example, wants to 'Be more active rather than passive...tweet rather than read tweets'. 'Write more blog posts' was another resolution - not mine I should add, I'm not sure how I could possibly fit more blogging in!

At least one person seems to have set 'doing less' as a goal for the new year. Fabien Marry states that 'My New Year's resolution is to cut down on the number of sites / RSS feeds tweets that I follow daily, as this volume is not compatible with a full time job'. In this age of information overload, I wonder if there isn't a place for some digital spring cleaning in all of our home and work lives. The enigmatic Angela K agrees: 'I want to control the flow of information I willingly allow to get to me. It is meant to serve my purposes, not have me check seven different accounts with eight different passwords'.

Happy New Year

However 2010 turns out, I look forward to exploring it with you in FUMSI magazine. Do let me know what you want to hear about during the new year - you can tweet in my direction @currybet or email me at martin.belam@fumsi.com. In the meantime, enjoy your holidays, and I wish you a happy new year.

By Martin Belam

Martin Belam is The Guardian newspaper's Information Architect, and Contributing Editor for the ‘Share' section of FUMSI magazine. Martin specialises in the design of information for media websites, having worked at the BBC, Sony and spent several years as a consultant. He blogs at currybet.net and for The Guardian. His new year's resolutions for 2010 include answering emails promptly, meeting deadlines, to stop being distracted by funny videos on YouTube, and being more organised in his working habits. These are pretty much exactly the same as the resolutions he made in 2009, 2008, 2007...

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