So every year in December we like to celebrate our brilliance with handy lists that talks about all the cool things that have happened in the industry or throughout the internet in the past 365 days. These are awesome, sometimes fun to read, and thanks to a few enterprising individuals with a talented editor, they can be fun to watch too. It takes the celebration a step up and makes the information entertainment. This is awesome! INFOTAINMENT. Thanks.

Without a whole lot of research or looking back, I can probably label 2010 as the year of over-sharing, right? Beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare… we’ve got the Like button and share buttons, and other buttons showing up all over the place. We’ve finally figured out that the next step to creating a bajillion bytes of content is to help people share it with their friends, and they can tell their moms, and then they can forward it to everyone else they’ve ever met.

The problem is, this creates an echo chamber that people are starting to resent and avoid. It sometimes feels like a lot of people are talking and only a few people are doing… And this is OK, we need the conversation… we just need smarter, more efficient ways to navigate it.

So… What’s next?

I think 2011 will be about making information actionable. With so much content being shared in real-time, we’ll be able to quantify the conversation. Google.org is a perfect example of how this is happening on a large scale, but the same idea can be tailored to micro-movements, opinions, and decisions. Services like hunch, for example have figured out a correlation between the way people cut their sandwiches and their propensity for being a vegetarian (if you cut diagonally, your much more likely to be one)... but their making those same correlations for more actionable applications too (like a gift suggestion tool from gifts.com)

In a lot of ways, this is the same thing Amazon.com has been doing for ever with their suggestion algorithm, right? People who viewed this product were also interested in X. Now those connections and conversations are happening all over the web, with the products we buy, Movies we watch, and even the food we prepare.

Once all the information is organized, it can be manipulated, filtered, and analyzed like numbers in a spread sheet. Played back over time, and eventually… used to predict the future.