Why did venture capitalist Ross Levinsohn's prediction that 2008 would be all about widgets seem so tired and predictable? Because it was. "If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and YouTube, then it's a fair bet that 2007 will be about further personalizing life online," Newsweek wrote a year ago. Instead, 2007 turned out to be all about social networks, user-generated content, and YouTube. A shining example of how even the most obvious predictions are wrong.

"What will be the app in 2008?" videoblogger Florian Seroussi asks Jeff Pulver, the Internet-calling pioneer who founded the company that became Vonage. "Life," Pulver answers, "I think we get a life." Nice thought. I'll take that bet. Seroussi's follow-up question: "Life 2.0?"

I should include end-of-year lists. But there are three even more annoying artifacts you'll be stuck with every freaking day of the coming year.

What's in store for 2008? Ask ex-Fox exec and new Velocity Interactive Group investor Ross Levinsohn. "The deconsolidation of big media, something happening with Yahoo, I think, and probably widgets. Or Facebook plus widgets," Levinsohn told Kara Swisher. On second thought, don't ask.

"Someone will explain what WiMax is, which I'll try to obtain only to realize it's unaffordable," says David of David's Log in his clever 2008 predictions.

Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz dug up a 2007 audit on the 1989 book, Future Stuff. The book describes 250-some consumer products that "should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000." It gets a few things right, like Viagra and flat-screen TVs. But mostly it's wrong.

I normally decline to make predictions, because what really happens is always weirder. But Valleywag's official 2008 list was such a borefest — I thought I was reading BusinessWeek or Battelle — that I cracked. Here's my fearless outlook.

"2008 is the year Facebook grinds to — not a halt — but definitely a slowdown. The backlash is already here. I've said it before; I'll say it again: Facebook flight." Ah, the sweet, juicy sound of BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl plopping his cojones on the table. We credit his bravado, but he's wrong. Beacon was bad for Facebook on the blogs, but users hardly noticed.

Along with gifts, wassailing, and bah humbugs, the holidays bring an onslaught of predictions for the new year that mostly aren't worth reading. But if you are interested, egoblogger Robert Scoble sits down with the Supremely Tanned One, Federated Media chairman John Battelle, to ask how he manages to make predictions that are remarkably accurate. The secret, replies Battelle to the fawning Scoble, after first congratulating himself for his success rate, is: "A lot of these are not that difficult to predict." It doesn't take the ambiguities of a Nostradamus quatrain to predict that Microsoft would buy its way into advertising, Yahoo would struggle, blogs would get better, and people would call Web 2.0 a bubble. So if you are preparing your own predictions for 2008 and want to achieve a high success rate, don't predict — just state the obvious.

Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.