From Mashable's Pete Cashmore: While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming
apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:
Real-time ramps up
Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007.
The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our
interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive ...
it's a sense of living in the now.
But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that's inevitable -- cargo cults
abound). It's a combination of factors, from the always-connected
nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a
Google search.
Why wait until you get home to post a restaurant review, asks consumer trends tracker Trendwatching,
when scores of iPhone apps let you post feedback as soon as you finish
dessert? Why wonder about the name of that song, when humming into your
phone handset will garner an instant answer from Midomi?
Look out, too, for real-time collaboration: Google Wave
launched earlier this year, resulting in both excitement and confusion.
A crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki, Wave is a
platform for getting things done together. Web users, however, remain
baffled. In 2010, Wave's utility will become more apparent.
Location, location, location
Fueled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones, location-sharing services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude are suddenly in vogue.
As I ruminated in this column two weeks ago, Foursquare and its ilk
may become the breakout services of the year ... provided they're not
crushed by the addition of location-based features to Twitter and
Facebook.
What's clear is that location is not about any
singular service; rather, it's a new layer of the Web. Soon, our
whereabouts may optionally be appended to every Tweet, blog comment,
photo or video we post.
Augmented reality
It's
yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality
has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009.
Enabled
by GPS, mapping data from the likes of Google and the accelerometer
technology in modern phones, AR involves overlaying data on your
environment; imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life
with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and Wikipedia entries
about the sights you see.
When using Layar,
for instance, the picture from your phone's video camera is overlaid
with bubbles of information from Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Search and
Twitter. The challenge for such services is to prove their utility:
They have the "cool factor," but can they be truly useful?
Content 'curation'
The
Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is
outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become
an increasingly common complaint.
In the attention economy,
with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages
vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One
solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best
stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to
personalization.
In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your
friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect
program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based
on the preferences of your network.
Meanwhile, Google's Social Search
experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using
information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and
the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your
consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.
Professional "curation"
has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than
experts in their fields? I explored this possibility in a CNN article
last month titled "Twitter lists and real-time journalism" .
Cloud computing
Cloud
computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there's no doubt this
transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications
cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere
("the cloud"), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables
collaboration with distributed teams.
The cloud movement will
see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 with the launch of
"Office Web Apps," free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and
OneNote released in tandem with Microsoft Office 2010.
Next year will also see the launch of Google's Chrome OS, a free, Web-centric operating system that forces us to ask: How many desktop applications do we really need?
Internet TV and movies
Is
2010 the year the majority of our television starts coming to us via
the Internet? There's certainly more activity here than at any other
time: Among the early-adopter set, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and Netflix's
Roku box lead the field.
Hulu in particular has sustained remarkable growth this year, while the movie studios are getting on board with the launch of Epix, a Hulu for films.
Convergence conundrum
The
outlook for devices in 2010 appears somewhat contradictory: While the
convergence trend continues apace and many of our gadgets are folded
into the smartphones we carry around every day, we're seeing a converse
trend in which task-specific devices gain popularity.
GPS device maker TomTom recently introduced a $100 iPhone app that removes the need to buy a TomTom hardware device. Google then one-upped the company by releasing free turn-by-turn directions
on devices running its Android operating system. Garmin and TomTom
beware: Standalone GPS devices may meet their demise in 2010.
Also on the endangered gadgets list: Flip video cameras, which PC World declared dead upon the launch of the iPhone 3G S. Meanwhile, Apple executives say the iPhone is cannibalizing the iPod: Why carry two devices when you only need one?
Paradoxically,
the e-book reader is seeing traction as a single-use device. With
hard-to-read, power-hungry laptop screens proving impractical for
reading, and smartphone screens proving too small, the Kindle and its
competitors are gaining buzz.
However, I'd argue that the
e-book reader is a fad: Carrying an extra device is never desirable,
and the major factor preventing convergence is the lack of superior
screen technology. Flexible, expanding low-power screens on cell phones
might tip the balance.
The real power of Amazon's Kindle is
its ease of use: a virtual bookstore so simple that it does for books
what Apple's iTunes did for music. The devices will converge, but the
"app store" model for books will persist across all devices. The
technology won't be with us in 2010, however.
Social gaming
There's little risk of social gaming proving a bad bet in 2010 -- Zynga's FarmVille game on Facebook now counts more active users than Twitter, claims a Facebook executive. Meanwhile, rival Playfish was recently acquired by Electronic Arts in a deal valued at up to $400 million.
Of growing interest in 2010, however, will be the virtual currencies
these games have spawned: In the allegedly unmonetizable world of
social media, virtual buying and selling may be the route to riches for
some social media sites -- a concept I outlined in this column under
the title "Is Facebook the future of micropayments?"
Mobile payments
I'd
wager that 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated
mobile payments market. While much of Asia has embraced the technology,
the U.S., in particular, has lagged. There's reason for optimism in
2010, however: From PayPalX to Amazon's mobile payments platform for
developers, the big players are seizing the mobile payments
opportunity.
Meanwhile, newcomer Square,
founded by the creator of Twitter, began its rollout this week to much
early-adopter excitement: The company enables merchants to accept
payments via Apple's iPhone.
Fame abundance, privacy scarcity
Warhol was right:
Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in
thousands of niches: We're all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter
and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.
We're
seeing the ongoing voluntary erosion of privacy through public sharing
on Facebook and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the
inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices.
The
incredible efficiency of Web-based communication and our Google-fueled
appetite to know everything about everything (or everyone) right now
are combining to make Tiger Woods the canary in the privacy coal mine.
Expect personal privacy -- or rather its continued erosion -- to be a
hot media topic of 2010.
Al Gore Founder, Alliance for Climate Protection 
Anna Sui Fashion Designer 
Dave Matthews Musician
Martha Stewart Founder, Martha Stewart Omnimedia
Keith Urban Musician 
Betsey Johnson Fashion designer 
Donald Trump Chairman/President, Trump Organization 
Katie Couric Anchor, CBS Evening News 
Wyclef Jean Musican, Producer, & Humanitarian 
Kevin Rose Founder, Digg.com 
Rachael Ray Television Host & Bestselling Author 
Andy Roddick Professional Tennis Player 
Queen Rania Queen of Jordan 
Arianna Huffington Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post 
Anderson Cooper Host of CNN’s AC360 
Ryan Seacrest Host, American Idol & Radio Personality 
Deepak Chopra Founder, The Chopra Center 
Anne Geddes Photographer 
Seth Godin Author, Blogger & Founder of Squidoo 
Vint Cerf Chief Internet Evangelist, Google 
Tim Ferriss Author, The 4-Hour Workweek 
Tim Brown CEO & President, IDEO 
Dean Ornish Founder & President, PMRI 
Tony Hsieh CEO, Zappos.com 
Shawn Fanning Founder & CEO, Rupture 
Charles Huang Co-Creator, Guitar Hero 
Stephen Bliss Senior Artist, Rockstar Games
Internet company AOL has sold Bebo, the social networking site it bought two years ago for $850m.
They just know that when they press the button, a raisin pops out. 
GERHARD KASBAUER, spokesman for the Vienna zoo, on the orangutan who takes photos of her life that zookeepers then post to 
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