Based on the recent changes to the website and iPhone app, here's the direction I see Twitter heading in 2012:

• Tweets older than five minutes are automatically deleted. It's all about real-time, baby!
• Twitter Search will go away completely. Yet another confusing feature, gone!
• Tweets without hashtags will be demoted. Hashtags are where it's at!
• Private messages will go away. Why would you talk to your friends when you can interact with companies?
• Your timeline will be filled with sponsored tweets (perfectly relevant to your interests, of course!)
• Companies can write tweets longer than 140 characters, and include images and videos right there on your timeline. Sweet!
• The star button will change to a "Like" button.
• You can comment on sponsored tweets, and tweets from hot celebrities like Kim Kardashian!
• No more permanent linking to tweets. Only those darned /power users/ and /journalists/ used this feature anyway.
• No more third-party clients. These *confuse* users!

Here's an idea which I think is great but really don't have time (motivation) to implement.

The trouble with social networks today is that they are centrally-controlled by a single organization, which means every user must put all of their trust in this company in order to use it for personal purposes. The company, being a company, expects to turn a profit somehow, and if charging users isn't an option then it needs to monetize them somehow. Facebook does this by selling your information to advertisers. One other problem with Facebook is that law enforcement can subpoena the company and get any user's private messages, usage, location, passwords or anything else they find useful, without the user's permission and for any reason the law sees fit. This can be done en masse and in secret. As a perk to employees, Facebook used to allow its people full access to anybody's data. I don't think it's true anymore but it's amazing the amount of trust we place in them.

The same, of course, is true for text messages, tweets, emails, phone calls and pretty much everything else (even, I think, Skype). You don't really have privacy, you just have trust in the organization to give you a reasonable amount of privacy, and allow that company to sit between you and your friends and deliver your most private thoughts to your friends.

So we need a way for people to talk to each other without any potential interception by a third party, right? We already have this, with PGP encryption, except it needs to be expanded to handle more than just email.

As I understand it, the way PGP works is this: I have a private key, which is a string of characters too long to memorize, and a public key, another long string of characters. I sign my emails with my private key, and people with my public key can verify that it's me with a simple check. People can use my public key to encrypt messages which only I can decrypt with my private key. I keep my private key safe, on my hard drive or on a USB key, so that no one can steal it and pretend to be me. The private key is so long that it would take even the most powerful computers several thousand years to guess it.

The way the new social network would work is this: everyone would have software on their computer/iphone/device/implant/whatever, let's call it CryptBook. When you first use it, CryptBook asks you to create an account. The makers of CryptBook don't make you pick out a password; instead, they ask for a $10 donation, and in return they send you two personalized USB keys. On these USB keys you encrypt a private PGP key. One key stays with you, and in case you lose it, the other one goes to your safety deposit box (or to a friend, or to a secret hidden bunker or wherever). If you lose both USB keys, your account is forever lost and you have to start over. But at least no one else can steal your key.

As soon as you sign on with your private key, the service allows you to connect to friends in a distributed fashion. Your computer connects directly to the "network," which is massively distributed, encrypted and cached, so that you can view your friends' profiles and pictures even when you're offline. Messages are sent client-to-client and cached on your friends' computers. Friend requests must be accepted by both people, so even though your data everywhere is encrypted with your private key, it is only stored on your computer and your trusted friends' computers. To add your first friend, you have to be on the same wireless network as them and they must accept the request; once you are part of the service, you can see your friends' friends and add them, too. Because of this, none of the network would need to go through DNS, which has the potential to be monitored by law enforcement in the future. Everything critical to the network would be P2P. Maybe to make it easier to add your friends, "edge" services would sprint up to offer up a directory of them, but users will have to trust these services in the same way they would trust a phone call from a "relative" to not be a scammer.

Some great things about this proposal:

- Security-conscious users are happy because they don't have to remember another password, they control where their data lives and that it doesn't pass through a single entity

- The CryptBook people earn a steady profit off of $10 USB keys, which should only cost them $1 once they hit an appropriate economy of scale. The reason for personalized USB keys is so they can be trendy (a standard USB drive would work just fine, too).

- The ecosystem of the Internet is happy because there is finally a way for users to identify themselves without having a relationship with some corporate entity which could change their terms of service at any time

- Liberty-conscious users are happy because a corporation can't claim rights to any of the intellectual property they share through CryptBook

Some not-so-great things about this proposal:

- Confusing to users ("How do I add all my friends?" "How do I set a password?")

- Law enforcement will hate it and will try to shut down the CryptBook company, stopping development

- Still possible to gain a non-friend's data by creating an account and pretending to be one of their real-life friends. (BTW, Facebook makes this easy; all of your friends' names and profile pictures are exposed for the world to see, no matter what your or their privacy settings are)

In addition, since Facebook already exists, nobody will want to join a social network with none of their friends on it, so compelling features would have to be added to CryptBook which would never exist on Facebook.

So that's where we stand right now with this idea. But I think some sort of distributed social network is coming, and probably already being developed by people smarter than me, especially if SOPA passes.

I like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 and I look forward to using it on a tablet. A lot of apps are going to come out for it and a lot of developers will become very rich. The frameworks are easy, flexible, and designed to make very consistent apps which integrate very well with what Microsoft has invented.

But two things come to mind:

1. I don't think people will like using this for their desktop machines. No one wants to hold their arm up to touch their screen, a mouse is just better when you're at your desk. Your arm will get tired if you have to move it all around just to work with a spreadsheet or scroll a web page. The problem gets bigger when you're talking about 21 and 24-inch monitors. So, people will either use only the "legacy" interface for a long time or deal with the Metro interface with a mouse, which it wasn't designed for.
2. This stuff is all such a long ways from coming out. At least a year. Lots can change in a year—Google will no doubt start their copying machines and have a workable competitor by then (since their tablet strategy is pretty much doomed right now), and we have no idea what Apple has in the works because they only announce it when it's ready. When Windows 8 comes out maybe enough people will already have tablets that no one will want to switch.

The App Store has always confused me.

Browsing apps today seems more like browsing the yellow pages. For users to get the best experience, they should be able to look around in a more immersive interface, without so much text. You go to Foot Locker to try on the shoes. People don't read.

Maybe we need a full-screen carousel of app interfaces, with videos, demos and other interactive content, instead of lists and lists of icons tucked inside a single "App Store" icon. Maybe the app store should be integrated with Safari better. But one thing is for sure: for it to succeed, we need to be able to install apps as easily as visiting a website.

Ripping the user out of the app store and making her type in a password, and then making her wait for the entire app to download, and then tap again before using it, is about the most disruptive experience possible. That is no way to sell shoes.

Last month, Apple demoed iOS 5 at the WWDC keynote address. I made a list of predictions beforehand—let's score 'em, and make a few more since Apple predictions generate some serious traffic.

Notifications: We did indeed see a revamp here. Now, they are pulled down from the top of the screen, just like all the jailbreak iPhones do and just like the Palm Pre and Android phones. I threw in a wildcard guess (that they would be pulled from the left side of the screen) which was incorrect. I still think it would be neat to be different, though. One out of two possible points.

Widgets: Did and didn't happen. We have stocks and weather on the iPhone's notifications screen, but for some reason those are the only widgets, and you don't even see these on the iPad. Clearly a half-finished feature, so maybe my prediction was just too early instead of incorrect. Call it what you will. Half a point.

Auto-updating: Yes. iCloud will let you back up and restore your phone, but you have to enable it yourself. This is a killer feature and will finally let me use iTunes for playing music instead of staring at a "synch" screen. One point!

iCloud: I was dead-on about the synching of music, apps and documents (which live inside apps). No user-login capability though. I would imagine that this is coming soon since iCloud ties all your apps to the same Apple ID even stronger. This will come in handy when, for example, you want a different set of Safari bookmarks than your wife. One point out of two.

Concierge: This is what I thought Apple would call an enhanced voice control service. Didn't happen, zero points awarded.

HTML 5 apps: Nothing was announced here. I'm not sure if there is anything un-announced coming in iOS 5 relating to HTML 5 apps, but if there is, it's covered by the NDA. Let's give me a quarter point for being half right on an easy question.

In-app purchases for Mac apps: Got it. Point!

Steve Jobs will tell everyone to turn off their WiFi for a demo: Nope, no demos required wireless. No points.

There will be an incredible demo of the iPad 2′s graphics capabilities that will blow everyone away: Didn't happen, no points.

MobileMe will be rebranded as iCloud, and a one-year subscription will be included when you buy any device: I got the easy part of this prediction correct, but iCloud is free. Half a point.

Phil Schiller: Happened. One entire point.

Final score, based on my dubious scoring system: 6.25 out of 13. Better than last year!

MORE PREDICTIONS:

• Lion will be released this month alongside new MacBook Airs (or is it "MacBooks Air?")
• iOS 5 will be released in September alongside a new iPhone and iPod Touches (or is it "iPods Touch?")
• Publishers will not understand that they cannot just load a bunch of PDFs into the iPad / iPhone newsstand. Businesses making apps to assist publishers will make huge bucks. At the top of the money pile will be Adobe. Side question: why does the iPhone have a newsstand? ("What is this, a newsstand for ANTS?")
• As soon as iOS 5 is released, apps will standardize on using Twitter for authentication instead of asking users to create accounts (wishful thinking on my part)
• Lots of iPad games will start using Apple TV to display things
• The next version of the Apple TV will be smaller and include velcro and an RF remote, so it can be mounted out-of-sight

Newspapers such as my local Omaha World Herald are starting to experiment with paywalls. The basic premise is that print subscribers get free online access, while everyone else needs to pay $10/month for access. This raises a number of questions and has been analyzed by lots of smart people. Here are the questions I have for Omaha.com:

1. What does Omaha.com offer that I can't get on a combination of free sources, such as the AP (for national news), JournalStar.com (local news and commentary) and over-the-air TV (local/national news)? Bonus points if the answer doesn't include the words, "Cindy Lange-Kubick." Local commentary is not a business model by itself.
2. How did you settle on $10/month? This invites the comparison to Netflix and Wall Street Journal, both of which charge around $8/month.
3. Will you distinguish your digital offering, or are you sticking to a "print first" approach for all articles? For example, do you plan on having interactive infographics, long-form articles, blogs, wikis, an enhanced taxonomy and social content to make use of the medium? Or will you be following the inverted pyramid, strictly enforcing article word counts, and tacking on comments/discussion as an afterthought?
4. Right now reading Omaha.com is a chore. The layout is not easy to navigate, there is a lot of scrolling to get to the narrow channel of content down the middle, and it is dominated by ads. How will this change when the paywall comes up? The type of readers who pay for content are the type who care about the experience of reading it.

The internet is changing the distribution methods for intellectual property. In the same way that Apple is succeeding with iPod and iTunes, Amazon is succeeding because they make it easy to purchase books and pleasant to read them on their device. Maybe newspapers could learn a thing or two from these models.

Conan O'Brien: My next guest tonight is a blogger, activist, author, fashion icon and self-described celeBROtante, whatever that means. Please give it up for Gavin Koehler!
Audience: [raucous applause]
Gavin: [walks out from behind curtain wearing Jay Leno mask, bobbing head uncontrollably. The audience loves this.]
Conan: [claps slowly, shaking his head and frowning]
Gavin: [approaches audience front row, they all crowd around him and he shakes each and every one of their hands. The audience is really eating this up]
Gavin: [returns to seat, waving his arms and bobbing his head, doing a wing flap with his elbows, waddling left and right across the stage a couple of times before finally sitting down]
Conan: You are an ass.
Gavin: [doing full Jay Leno impression] Heya folks, howya doin'?
Audience: [roars with laughter]
Gavin: [still in Jay Leno impression mode] Hey, Lorena Bobbit's in the news. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? [bobs head left and right]
Conan: OK, that's actually pretty good.
[beat]
Conan: That's it? All you've got is the setup? You're the worst comic ever.
Audience: [laughs]
Conan: Like I said, that's a pretty good impression.
Audience: [laughs louder]
Conan: [raises arms] Pretty good impression, could be of anyone, really. Doesn't remind me of anyone in particular. [starts Jay Leno impression] I'm innocent! [bobs head]
Gavin: [takes off mask] Ahh.
Conan: Is that better? Get a little stuffy in there?
Gavin: It's actually a really big mask. Plenty of room for my chin to move around.
Conan: Haha. Right. So what's the deal? CeleBROtante? Are we just allowed to make up ridiculous titles for ourselves now? Are you like The Situation?
Gavin: That's really all a person like myself can hope for in life, to one day be compared to The Situation.
Conan: Oh really? It's like-
Gavin: -on Conan O'Brien! Hit it, Max! [points over at the Max Weinberg-less band]
Band: [awkwardly looks around, not sure if Gavin is joking or not]
James Wormsworth: [plays rimshot and grins ear to ear]
Gavin: That's what I'm talking about! Boy, that Max guy, never get rid of him, Conan. Class act! I love you Max!!
James Wormsworth: [grins a super huge grin and nods his head]
[beat]
Conan: [shakes his head] This show is broken. It will never air. This is all going to be reruns of Alias.
Gavin: That was actually a really good show! I would watch that instead of this.
Conan: I would too. So [looks at card] it's all over the news that you and Jenna Fischer are an item. Anything you'd like to say now that you have a captive audience?
Gavin: No. [stares at Conan]
[beat]
Audience: [uneasy laughter]
Conan: [stares back at Gavin, no expression on his face]
Gavin: [also no expression. Camera zooms in.]
Conan: [Camera zooms in deep to Conan's face]
Audience: [big laugh for this one]
Gavin: [cracks]
Conan: Aha! I got you!
Gavin: This show is broken.
Conan: I know, I know. Ok, what's next here. [scans card]
Gavin: [takes card away, throws it backstage, stands up and starts dancing. Points at the band.] Gimme a beat, Max!
Band: [funky drum beat and bass, trumpets join in after two measures]
Conan: [stands up and starts dancing as well]
Gavin: [takes off jacket and throws it behind the couch, continuing to dance]
Conan: [takes off jacket in one quick movement. Very svelte, audience loves this.]
Jeff Ross, from the producer's booth: [buries his head in his hands]
Mike Sweeney, sitting next to Jeff: [giggles maniacally]
[Camera pulls back as Gavin goes into the audience, dancing up on audience members. Mark Pender trades for a soprano saxophone and starts on an improvised solo, red in the face.]

At WWDC, one of the slides indicated that iOS had a much larger market share than Android, and another slide showed that there were much more iPhone devices out there than Android. This was met with a lukewarm applause by attendees and I think I know why: they thought Apple was lying.

While both facts are true, they can be confusing. Android is growing faster and is selling more phones than Apple is selling iPhones. There is lots of news lately about Android overtaking iPhone. But these articles are comparing Android, the operating system, against iPhone, a device. Yes, when pitted against each other, Android is winning the market share war.

But that's not a fair comparison. When pitted against any other phone, iPhone is winning by a very clear and distinct margin. When comparing profit margin, iPhone is winning by an even larger margin. The iPhone got a year head start, so there are more iPhones out there than Android phones. When you compare iOS, the operating system, against Android, the operating system, there are more iOS devices being sold because iOS represents iPhones, iPod touches, Apple TVs and iPads. In each of the device categories it appears, iOS devices out-sell all other devices, and in all cases except for phones, iOS devices out-sell all other devices in its respective category *combined*.

So why doesn't iPhone have more market share right now? If Android is growing faster in the phone category, Apple will not be able to define the future of phones, as they clearly want to do. If Android ends up being installed on 80% of phones in the future, protocols like FaceTime are just not going to catch on if they only work with 20% of your friends' phones. And FaceTime is no longer a selling feature if none of your friends are already on it. Apple would be forced to adopt protocols someone else made instead of defining their own.

First of all, right now smart phones are less than 10% of the market, and everyone expects it to be near 100% within the next few years. There is huge opportunity there for growth and the battle for market share is just beginning. Apple has so far been limited by how much supply it has, not how many phones it can sell, so they have aimed for the upper-end of the market with a $200 price point. Apple is in the business of selling high-quality hardware so this is an easy target to hit.

Now that supply constraints have relaxed a bit, Apple has brokered a deal with Verizon which indicates to me that they are ready to grow. The Verizon deal was stage one. What is stage two?

The iPhone 5, expected this Fall, is another part of this deal. Many potential Verizon iPhone buyers have held off since they don't want a phone which will be obsolete in a few months, so the iPhone 5 will be the biggest launch yet. Since each previous iPhone has doubled its beginning sales from the previous year (and that was with an AT&T-only phone), I would expect this one to continue this trend and possibly exceed it, even at its standard $199 price tag.

But what about that price? Android phones can be had for free with a service plan. If the average user just wants Angry Birds and a bunch of free apps, how does Apple expect them to fork over $199 up front? Keep in mind that they are already asking users to pay for a monthly data plan.

One solution would be to cut the device's price in half. At $99, a phone with hardware similar to the iPhone 4 might still give Apple a hefty profit since the price of the individual components have decreased due to economies of scale. They already did this with the 3GS and the 3G when the iPhone 4 and 3GS were released. But last year's Apple device can't necessarily compete with this year's stampede of Android devices.

Maybe another way to compete against free Android phones is to offer...wait for it... a free iPhone. This would be an iPhone 4 running iOS 5, with a required unlimited data plan. AT&T has phased out its unlimited plan and Verizon has announced plans for it, and I think it's because they plan to re-introduce it for $10 more per month. If you want an iPhone 4 for free, you can have it as long as you buy this new plan. The carriers are happy because they get users to sign up for a beefed-up two-year contract (they are in the contract business and not the device business), and Apple is happy because a good chunk of that $240 goes back to them and (more importantly) they have a more attractive deal for lots of people.

A few other thoughts and predictions:

• If the $10 / month unlimited plan indeed happens, I would expect the price of text messaging to drop. This is a feature that is in trouble with the new iMessages and the plethora of chat apps available on Android and iOS. By lowering the price of texting they make the iPhone 4 more attractive to buyers. Look for Sprint to try this out first.
• A free (or even $99) phone leaves out repeat iPhone buyers—why would an iPhone 4 user upgrade to a cheaper phone? These users are willing to pay $199 and are too important to be ignored. In addition, Apple loves to one-up themselves year after year, and are not going to rest on their laurels while competitors catch up to the Retina display and FaceTime. Apple has to create another $199 device this year to capture these buyers and hold the attention of the press.

Yahoo has been flailing for quite a while now in the traffic numbers and they are having problems focusing. Google stole their search and advertising traffic, Facebook is de facto home of social connections, both are stealing their best employees and no one is interested in creating a personalized home page anymore.

Yahoo mail is doing great, but who cares? You can get free email anywhere, and people are using less and less of it now that Facebook is getting serious about their Messages feature. Besides, putting ads next to personal emails is not a respectable business model, and it just won't work if your core business isn't advertising.

Why hasn't more attention been brought to Flickr, a service that many people are happy to pay for? Does Yahoo's CEO even use it? (She seems more like a Snapfish user to me.) People with iPhones have snatched up Instagram in record time. Flickr for iPhone would be more popular if they had actually put some effort into making it useful. Right now it's great for browsing my own photos but that's about it.

How about Delicious? Just as Flickr used to be the de-facto photo sharing site on the web, Delicious used to be the best way to store, tag and share your bookmarks. But just like Flickr, they stopped innovating five years ago and have festered while competitors (like Pinboard) snatch up their most important users.

So what's left for Yahoo? I think their main users see it as a "web portal," a home page with a bunch of ever-changing links they can click on when they get bored. Does the world need a web portal anymore? Do people need their hand held or can they type in a URL all by themselves? Isn't this why AOL went under?

It's time for another round of last-minute WWDC predictions! Last year, I wrote this in the hall leading up to Presidio with all the other nerds enthusiasts, but this year I'm leaving you enough time to actually read this. Here's what I think is going to happen.

Notifications will see a revamp. Instead of an annoying popup, when a new alert is received, the left side of the screen will highlight and you can pull it over. Android's notifications come from the top, I think Apple will be reluctant to copy this. Notifications can include emails, text messages, Flickr pictures, Facebook chats, or anything developers can put inside of a web view.

Apps will be able to support a "widget mode" in which their height and width will be doubled on the home screen. This can display things like your latest Twitter update, your friends' latest Facebook posts, or the last few pictures you took with the camera. Widgets will be built in HTML5 and can receive updates via push notifications. They won't need to have rounded corners, either.

iPhones and iPads will gain an auto-update mode, and it will be enabled by default. Apple TV already does this, so we know it's possible in iOS. Devices will just upgrade to the latest firmware overnight, and users will have the option of downloading all app updates automatically at the same time.

Apple IDs will be used to synch music, apps and documents online as part of iCloud. iPads in particular will gain a "user login" capability so that families can share the device easier.

iPhones will gain a voice feature very similar to the Siri app. This app allows you to find restaurants, book reservations, set calendar reminders, and call a taxi all with just your voice. Maybe Apple will allow developers to work with this API, too. Just a shot in the dark, but a great name for this feature would be "Concierge."

When you scroll your iPhone / iPad home screen all the way left, right now you see an entire screen dedicated to a simple Search bar. This area can be used for a whole lot more. I'm guessing notifications and voice control will be seen here. The Lock screen is another place for both widgets and notifications.

HTML5 apps will gain more capabilities. Particularly, Web Sockets support, push notifications, in-app purchases, multitasking (the fast-app switching variant), and access to the camera, address book and calendar. Apple will start listing them in the iOS App Store alongside native apps, and they will go through the same review process.

I also think it's time that apps in the Mac App Store gained support for in-app purchases. Not sure if Apple has anything else up their sleeves for Lion, except for a lot of demos showing off all the new APIs and end-user features. Eventually I think the iPad will get "Mission Control," but I don't think it will happen this year.

Other random predictions:

• Steve Jobs will tell everyone to turn off their WiFi for a demo. Everyone will obey.
• There will be an incredible demo of the iPad 2's graphics capabilities that will blow everyone away.
• MobileMe will be rebranded as iCloud, and a one-year subscription will be included when you buy any device.
• Phil Schiller.

There you have it. Maybe if I get some of them right I'll do a scorecard after it's over. Keep in mind that it will be a miracle if I am at least partly accurate—all of this is completely made up.