2006: The Year in Review
I’m sure that by this time last year, several A-List types had already come out with their retrospective-slash-prediction posts, but strangely none seem to be forthcoming here at the tail-end of 2006. In which opportune moment, I shall put out my own look back at the year and everyone can look like they are copying me…
Has it really been that long?
There are some things that happened this year that seem to have happened so long ago that it doesn’t seem like a mere 12 months has passed:
- Newsvine launched in beta; I personally felt that the hype that surrounded its launch made it impossible to live up to its promise, but its now consistently mentioned in pieces on social media
- We all hated 37signals for a little while (and let them know about it)
- Veerle blew us all away with her 2.0 redesign
- There was much excitement over the public launch of IE7 Beta 2
- We found out four things about a lot of people
- IE7 Beta 2 version 2 came out, feature complete – but broke auto-clearing of floats
- Too many Ajax-powered beta sign-up pages appeared
- Everyone went dark
- We all got into JavaScript libraries
- Everyone hated Digg
- @media 2006 was another success
- O’Reilly trademarked the term ‘Web 2.0’. Everyone hated them
- It was the Year of the Grid – I don’t think I’ve read a book or attended a talk this year that hasn’t featured a screenshot from Subtraction
- BarCamp London happened, and Werewolf hit the UK scene
- Nobody was quite sure what to think about bad design – and MySpace became the bete-noir of choice for succeeding in spite of bad design
- Design is… desktop wallpapers abounded for a few hours in mid-September
- There was yet another blogosphere bunfight over non-representation by minorites at events
- @media 2007 was announced – on three continents! They’re nothing if not ambitious…
- Google bought YouTube
- There were rip-offs a plenty, some notable ones being Faulkner Wineries vs. Cork’d, 9rules vs. Toyota
- Everyone who was anyone went to work for Yahoo!
- Dave Shea launched the magazine inspired redesign of Mezzoblue
Is that all?
Well, those were the events and trends I managed to make a note of over the last 12 months; a year of bitching about each other, bookended by two great redesigns.
2007? Hell, I don’t know. More talk about the mobile web but no real movement, a ‘real standards’ backlash against the ‘real world’ folks, maybe? My New Year’s resolution is to learn Expression Engine and ditch Textpattern, and have a killer time at SxSW in March.
Have a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
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Previously: NewsGator Online rolls out minor changes
Next: Five things
Comments
- Gareth Rushgrove
- 597 days ago
Interesting to hear you say about Textpattern. I’m heading off it I think as well. It does just appear to have stalled which is a shame – although I’m more tempted by Django, or Rails and the like at the moment.
- #2
- Matthew Pennell
- 597 days ago
I wouldn’t have said that TxP has stalled, although I suppose if I think about it there haven’t been any new features that I’ve actually used in ages.
I’ve given up on learning any new languages until HTML5 and XHTML2 come along… ;)
- #3
First post on the first yearly review!
Next year will be openID’s year I hope so we can kiss goodbye to all those username / passwords we have to remember…