This post is part of a series where I try to make outlandish predictions for 2008. `Read the introduction for more details.`_

By the time you read this, a over a week will have passed and a week is a long time in politics. Maybe something will happen during the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries to shake things up a bit.

9. Social networking will become a protocol

We each meet more new people each year than my great-grandparents would have known in their entire lifetime. Not only that, but on the whole, you will meet a completely different set of new people than your best friends will, so the traditional shared memory of small communities does not help you. Human evolution has not yet caught up with this situation and the result is social amnesia - we cannot immediately recall all the details about all the people we have known. One way of coping is to keep really good diaries, something sadly I have hitherto failed to achieve. Another recent help is social networking sites.

I don't need Facebook to talk to people that I see in my daily life, I also don't need Facebook to interact with geeky friends, everything Facebook can do, something more efficient and less time-consuming can do. Facebook is, however, marginally useful to interact with non-geeks that I went to University with.

The current unique selling point of a service like Facebook or Myspace is that it bundles several functions together in a way that can be easily used by smart but technically dis-interested users and everything is nicely abstracted away behind consistent menus.

I, and perhaps other people, have been saying this for a while, but I still believe that social networking will eventually become a protocol. When you remove all the glitz from social networking sites, at the core are a few very basic functions:

• Pull: a convenient way of finding out contact details for half- remembered acquaintances.
• Push: a semi-open contact list that allows your acquaintances to give you their details.
• Pass: a service to pass messages between acquaintances.
• Promote: a page to share your interests, details, photos and so on.
• Play: a way to interact with communities of interest.

For the sake of this article, the last three are thoroughly uninteresting, email and the web solve these problems far more efficiently than any walled garden social networking service can do.

The first two are the ones that interest us here, it is the 'friends list' that is the selling point of site like Facebook. The problem with the 'friends list' is that it is site-specific. When the next cool social networking site comes out, you have to rebuild your list from scratch. So one could end up with half-a-dozen different overlapping but not identical friends-lists on different networks. Remembering where the heck a specific half-forgotten person is, which of the six lists, removes the convenience that is the main foundation of a social-networking site.

So there is a tipping point, where the cost of entry and exit from these social networking sites outweighs their utility. The exact point will vary across individuals, according to how much of a real offline life they have.

The way to square the circle is to make your friends list more independent of the web application that you currently have in front of you. The answer is not Google's OpenSocial, it is not Microsoft's Passport, or any vendor specific service. It will be a simple protocol that allows you to sync your friends-list between different web applications, instant messaging applications, email accounts, photo sharing sites and so on. A protocol that the majority of its users won't even realise they are using.

I don't think the answer is OpenID, but the answer is something like it or something on top of it. The reason that OpenID is good is that anyone can implement OpenID. So normal people can use their account at web service A, for web services B, C, D, E and F; with minimal form-filling in the process. On the other side, any website can accept OpenID, from an established headline site down to a blog, no permission or licence is required from anyone.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, OpenIDs do not necessarily map to a way of contacting people. If an OpenFriendList protocol was based on OpenID, then a web application, when given an arbitrary list of OpenIDs, would need to be able to send a message to an OpenID and expect it to go somewhere. The somewhere can change depending on the end user, they could have the messages go into their Facebook inbox, into their email, or onto their mobile phone. The main thing is that you can shoot text at an OpenID and expect it to be delivered.

Anyhow, I expect someone smarter than me will solve this problem in 2008 and no doubt become a millionaire in the process.

10. Mitt Romney becomes the president of the United States

You can't be a really blogger unless you make a guess about the US Election, even if you have no political knowledge or know nothing about America.

Both main US parties are far more right-wing than any party you will find in Europe (give or take a few Nazis), so there is not that much to divide them on policy. None of the candidates will propose to nationalise medicine or have the tax rates and redistribution of income that all Western European countries have. So in the end, it comes down to personality.

The problem is at the moment there are fifteen declared candidates and a few in the wings, so you might as well pick a name out of the hat at this point. So if I really have to choose a winner, I'll go for Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney ticks all the boxes that American voters seem to want. He is white, male, well spoken and looks mature but not haggard and elderly like many of the other candidates. He has five kids and a good looking wife who can create recipes and train horses. Romney was an extremely successful (but unexciting) businessman, then he managed to fly in and rescue the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, then he had a successful single term as Governor of Massachusetts and went out on a high.

So on paper he is what Americans would want, but in reality, he is just a bit too dull, he is the cookie-cutter presidential stereotype, which could make him look a bit distant to the average American, being a practicing Mormon won't help to make those outside Utah feel like he is "one of us". He also has no experience to hold up on foreign affairs, but considering that whatever position you adopt, Iraq is political kryptonite, maybe that is no bad thing.

Do to his chronic dullness, what Romney can't really do is provide charismatic inspiration, so he risks being sidelined by some of the more nutty candidates who will get more of the airtime. The democratic candidates have managed to generate more interest at the moment, but that is partly because some of their candidates are not dull grey-haired white men in suits.

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