Against-the-Grain Thinking for 2010

Great post Steve. I agree with you, especially on information overload. Twitter is like a stream of overwhelming nonsense, and the idea that you have to keep up several channels of social media to interact is unrealistic in the long run (unless you are a big corp who can hire people just for that). I like Twitter for some things, but I suspect that social media may have peaked (at least for web professionals who were early adopters).

Interesting points, Steve. I completely agree with you on social media and information overload. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, and how Twitter especially has become a time sink. I try to keep it in perspective, though. To me, Twitter is a great way to interact with Joomla friends such as yourself who are spread out all over the world. In my opinion, it's the best platform for that at the moment, even better than forum.joomla.org.

Regarding CMS's and their plateau in the Google trends, I can't argue with the data, but I think I interpret it a bit differently than you do. I think we're starting to see more quality over quantity. What I mean is, as the "big 3" CMS's continue to improve, they are reaching more of an enterprise-level audience. Part of their meteoric growth has been due to hobbyists and mom-and-pop shops taking advantage of their great features at little to no cost. Now, I think more and more larger organizations are seeing the value in open source CMS's. I think as this trend continues, the 3 platforms will continue to improve, remain free, and attract even more attention in the future from hobbyists and mom-and-pop shops. I think by the end of this year we'll start seeing an upswing in the growth of these systems.

Of course, I have no data to back that up, so take my opinion for what it's worth.

I think that people want to be able to know everything that they can find out about you. Transparency is going to be important for the future. Social consciousness will go to new heights because now people can find out about who you are and what you think.

If you aren't transparent, and your competitor who has just as good a product or service is, then the business will likely go to them. The CMS is simply a wrapper for information. It's importance is in how it can accommodate what people want and need.

It's no wonder that Facebook is so popular. Maybe that is the reason that the CMS platforms are not progressing at the levels they were. Facebook is doing a better job than the CMS at being simple to use. Social media has a ready made worldwide network. Could it be that the Googles and Microsofts will one day get their wish for total dominance over the Internet by making eventually owning all the social media heavyweights and making Joomla!, Wordpress, and whatever else comes along redundant?

Like Cory I interpret the Google trends a bit differently. Maybe you can see an answer here to the question if open source would benefit from the financial crisis.

BTW: The same trend goes for other great open source solutions like Magento and Alfresco: http://www.google.com/trends?q...all&sort=0

So the plateau seems to have a different cause.

In 2009 we have experienced a vast and growing number of "Maintenance" requests. Companies big and small now focus on extending the life span of their Joomla CMS rather than invest in the latest technology and new nifty features and designs.

From what we read in the papers, this might be true for 2010 also. It will be interesting to see how the long awaited launch of Joomla 1.6 will be embraced by companies that are currently running a Joomla 1.0 or 1.5 web site without having any issues whatsoever.

The only sensible conclusion one can draw from that graph is "The number of searches on Google for these three keywords has plateaued during 2009".

Everything else is mere speculation. For all we know, it might even be caused by a change in how Google records that data.

I'd wager that the 'land rush" of the web is finally over, and that most folks that plan on having websites have one. I'll take that one step further and brashly predict that the number of new websites will start to ebb.

My take on CMS in the short term is similar to Louis' but for a different reason - I think publishing, and what we consider publishing online, is getting redefined. The traditional, article-based platforms are going to have a very hard time keeping up and adapting to others who take a much more polymorphic approach.

I am biased though :-)

Few people want your "brand". They want what *they* want and they want a two way relationship with you -- at the level they are comfortable with.

A person who is always promoting themselves in social contexts gets tiring. A person who acts like your new best friend when all you want to do is buy windshield washer fluid is not trusted. Technology has made it easier to be transparent and to be known, but it does not take the place of putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

Interesting trend in Google for searches, however, I wouldn't correlate the Google trend to the popularity of CMSes themselves.

1. People are getting educated, so there are fewer NOOBs who need to do an elementary search to learn the basic terminology.

2. Information Overload is a myth; an excuse to avoid doing the real work needed to persuade and lead. The key to good marketing and communication is to "shoot while the ducks are flying." Information overload isn't the problem which most novices run into. Relevance and timing is.

If you're selling snowblowers in the upper midwest, now's a great time to do it (January, during heavy snow season). Twitter 100x a day in June or July, and you'll get a clear message back from the market that a) you've got a relevance issue; and b) you're gonna have to store some of that snowblower inventory for a few more months.

Not only that, you MAY have just pissed off your prospective clientele, so they probably won't buy from you in January either.

You should leverage social media instead of just getting exposure and SE traffic. I am also getting a lot of clients who are "in the know" and want us to do the least amount of work possible so they can admin the CMS site themselves or their own staff. This has cut into our usual profits(mostly due to the recession where everyone seems to be holding back on big budget projects), so you have to offer some unique choices. JoomlaShacks SimpleWeb is an example. You also have to offer the value position of having a website built by a pro, SE exposure instead of slapping up a site of hopes to gain traffic; however, with FaceBook and Twitter, do they really need to work at SEM?