Inevitably the iPhone is my product of the year. I thought I was possibly overstating its importance when I wrote about it early in 2007, but I think I underestimated its impact on my life. It now travels everywhere with me. I read more blogs than I used to thanks to Google Reader’s iPhone interface. I also have reduced stress when it comes to work because I know that I can keep in contact with clients and the office regardless of location. All the iPhone really needs to be complete is a keychain mechanism for passwords and a Terminal application. If Apple doesn’t provide them, you can be sure that third parties will once the SDK is released.

One of the things I promised to do when getting the iPhone – indeed it was part of the cost justification – was to stop subscribing to newspapers. Blogs and RSS feeds provide more direct and timely access to information and comment than newspapers can and, unless you want it, without the ludicrous headlines:

With blogs and shared feeds everyone can gather, write and broadcast their own news. Yes, I only thought that physical newspapers were dead. I was wrong. More on this next year.

When it comes to my work, my long term dependency on jEdit ended with the launch of Panic’s fabulous Coda. But then things went weird and I ended up back with TextMate with which I had previously dabbled on a number of occasions. Apple finally released Mac OS X 10.5 later than scheduled. Time Machine, Spaces and under the hood improvements to memory management make it an essential purchase. Agile web development framework Ruby on Rails reached version 2, whole heartedly embracing RESTful development and in the process making application development even easier.

Organisational tool Remember The Milk launched two great services this year: integration with Google Mail, so you can link Mail with Tasks and write stuff like “Call George next Thursday,” and a great looking (and working) iPhone client. These two things made me switch from Apple Mail to Google Mail and ditch my various other attempts at time management.

Support for offline web applications is growing. Google Gears (PC World’s innovation of the year) is available for Firefox and can be built for Safari. If and when Safari officially gets Gears support, I’ll expect to see more web services to support offline access. There’s irony here: a fair number of service providers (including Google, Amazon and Facebook) now have iPhone versions of their products, targeted towards EDGE and GPRS network speeds. JetBlue has launched WiFi access in its planes. Yes, just as technology is being provided to support offline access of applications, we’re getting to the stage where offline access is becoming less necessary. Just as I predicted.

Now time for some predictions for next year. The iPhone will continue to dominate, um, everything. Besides this, software as a service will grow more popular. With the recent introduction of Amazon’s SimpleDB, Amazon now provides all that’s required for scalable, reliable web architectures. Many providers already use one or more of their services. RightScale assists this further by providing management tools. If this seems too scary there are integrated development and hosting services such as Heroku. I desperately need (and want) to start playing with this stuff.

Seth Godin strongly believes – and he’s right – that every time you interact with a customer you’re marketing.

But marketing goes further than this. Everything you do which affects others (people, companies, your pet dog), is marketing.

When I worked at Siemens, I used to give sweets to members of my software development team. Sometimes I gave them, sometimes I let people choose, sometimes I threw them. I had no favourites – everyone got them. Each method of delivery was a subtle hint. My team members rightly took these a little ‘thank you’ messages, but I was also marketing myself.

Few companies that I worked at understood that Fun was important. I think smaller companies are more guilty of this error than larger ones. Fun is considered an incompatible companion to Work. (In the same way that Beer and Pub are.) But the truth is Work requires Fun. Fun is where you find things about yourselves, others and solve problems, come up with ideas and generally innovate.

Still, I caught myself reading a recent blog from Last.fm about their new ballpit and thinking “so that’s what my subscription gets spent on!” (It wasn’t, by the way, which is somewhat disappointing.)

A follow-up post describes how they actually built their ballpit. It took them 19 hours from planning to completion – and it’s quite a ride.

You’ll never get that in a company that doesn’t do Fun.