I just left my job running personalised email service another.com. I was there for four years, through boom and bust. I guess you could call it fun (of the special, highly stressful variety that's only possible during a crash).

When we started the firm at the end of 1998, I had just left another job, running a web design agency called Webmedia. Lots of people asked me then "what's next?". I told them I was pretty sure we'd see continued growth in all the important numbers - audiences, share prices, ecommerce and advertising.

I didn't anticipate the boom (or at least not the more hysterical part of it) and I certainly didn't anticipate the collapse that followed. We were sure, in crafting our gorgeous business plan with its entirely credible charts and forecasts, that we'd be able to fund a substantial free email and identity service in several countries from advertising and ecommerce.

We were, of course, hopelessly wrong. Advertising nose-dived, stock markets collapsed and venture capitalists went on strike.

Of course, the good news is that another.com did survive and is now making a profit - the firm is now so lean that it's probably indestructible. You might say that's how it should have been in the first place and you'd probably be right (but nobody likes a smart arse)

So, given this decidedly up-and-down experience, am I qualified to answer the "what's next" question again? I think so. I think you acquire wisdom more quickly in a struggle, and I think mistakes are always the best lessons.

So, what's next? Ask any entrepreneur about the mysterious process of selecting a new project and you'll hear roughly the same thing. There's no point sitting in your garret waiting for inspiration to strike - you need to get out and find out where the excitement is. What's getting people going? In no particular order here are the things that have got the grassroots talking and creating.

Web services Not a technology - more a way of thinking. Web services (think of it as a singular noun!) is a set of methods and standards that will permit networked applications to talk to each other, to find out what each is capable of and to borrow resources and functions as needed. In many ways, web services represents the fulfilment of the net's early promise to connect everything with everything else and see what happens. If my data backup application can sidle up to Google and borrow some search logic for a specific function I won't have to code it myself. If your animation application needs to render a huge scene, it could hook up to Pixar's "render farm" and borrow some processor time without needing to learn a new protocol. Real applications, of course, will mostly be less glamorous but the promise - economic and technical - is enormous.

Social software Since the beginning, the web was supposed to be a richly social environment. You were supposed to create the web as well as read it. Tim Berners-Lee built a web page editor into his first browser. Marc Andreesen couldn't see the point and ripped it out of Mosaic. The rest is history. The web became another one-way medium of consumption. A new generation of two-way software, whose sole function is to connect human beings and to make the web "writable" again has caught the imagination of the geek and creative elite and will soon go mainstream. Clue: if you've read a weblog lately you're using social software. What's the economic model here? Uncertain to say the least.

Wi-fi You don't need me to tell you that wireless networks are springing up like weeds. The Guardian has covered wi-fi in detail. The excitement here is palpable. In less than two years, wi-fi has gone form obscure networking standard to consumer and business phenomenon. As a way of extending the reach of the net into nooks and corners and jumping gaps in provision, wi-fi is unparalleled. Many think wi-fi will complement or even replace the telcos' 3G white elephant. All we need now is a way of making money from it.

Moblogging Discussed elsewhere on this site today, moblogging connects mobile phones and social software by allowing users of the new camphones to post pictures and words to their weblogs from wherever they are. Moblogging is an utterly new medium of expression - coming, like all the best things, out of nowhere - built on the immediacy of actual, lived experience and exploiting the ubiquity and accessibility of the mobile phone. This is blogging for the twitchy, post-web generation. It's fun, spontaneous and creative. Because it requires you to use your mobile, it might even have an economic model - you'll pay to moblog on your monthly bill. It contains the potential to become the next cult activity and a major source of revenue for the operators. It might even turn out to be bigger than blogging itself.

So which of these will it be? Watch this space.

-- In Online's first edition of the New Year, out on January 2, we will be taking a look at the 25 technologies ready for take-off in 2003.