Del.icio.us is being used to share predictions for the new year (via This Week in Rojo).

Blake Ross, developer of Firefox, has a few gems, including this:

Yahoo, acclerating its bid to dominate the social space, will announce that it is buying the actual societies of 32 cash-strapped governments. Citizens will be allowed to link their existing names to their Yahoo accounts.

Paul Kedrosky predicts that click fraud will go mainstream

One prediction from I-don’t remember-where: users will increasingly create their own web from cobbled-together RSS feeds, much like the personalized homepages available from Google, Yahoo, Live (Microsoft), and others.

My take on this: we’ll see the rise of Portal Wars 2.0. If you recall, web portals were a big deal back in the late 1990s, when new internet uses didn’t know how to set a new home page.

Now, we’ll see users from the other end of the geek spectrum driving the portal push: people who are savvy enough to rip, mix, and burn RSS feeds together into their ultimate personal web experience.

So far, it seems like the portal offerings are still pretty much limited to aggregating RSS feeds, displaying new messages from your email inbox, and showing stock quotes, weather reports, and sports scores. In 2006, I predict that we will see web 2.0 technologies like Ajax turn the portal into the killer desktop application.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? We already have web service to handle just about everything, from word processing to to-do-lists to calendars and contact management. Now, imagine being able to add all of them as little portlets to your Google personalized home page. One page, never reloaded, yet always fresh.

The challenge will be, as with RSS, how to preserve a revenue model when the most useful elements of your service are separated from the parts that you make money on (i.e., the separation of content from advertising). I think it’ll require micropayments and secure feeds, so people can pay a reasonable amount for their feed content.

Since I don’t have the technical resources, the time, or the capital to create Killer Portal 2.0, here are the ingredients for anyone who does and wants to get rich:

• Ajaxed everything. Reloading is so 2004.
• Right-click to add feed content to the portal page
• Firefox extensions to make everything easier (and punish IE users)
• Added functionality (Zimbra-like) for, and integration with, Gmail
• Support for secure RSS feeds/RSS authentication, the lack of which is the biggest thing holding back web-based aggregators at the moment
• Drag-and-drop to rearrange page elements (doable, if not easy, with existing technology)
• Add or retrieve info via cell phone (SMS)
• Drag a URL onto the page to add new info (subscribing to new feeds is still too hard for most portals)
• Individual micro-control of options such as which feed elements are displayed
• Site-scraping feed creation for sites that update often, but don’t offer RSS (if there are any left)

That’s about it for now. Steal this list. Or add to it in the comments.