Epinions is Toast
#
Why does this concern Epinions? Epinions deals mostly with rating and reviewing products, which Froogle doesn't touch...yet. But another new toy from Google Labs does: WebQuotes. WebQuotes annotates your search with quotes (and links) from other websites. Imagine WebQuotes matched with a product search feature, and you can see why Epinions might be in trouble.
Epinions can fight back against irrelevance by attempting to become the prime source for quotations. But I still think people will click through from Google.
So. I will make my first tech-pundit prediction: Epinions is Toast.
Some of my reasoning in this piece is inspired by Paul Ford's fictional story August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.