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Web Trends
Notes from CNN Tech 10 Web trends to watch in 2010
Real-time
Real-time represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive. It was sparked by such website applications like Twitter and Facebook.
Real-time is a sense of living in the now. It's a combination of factors, from the always-connected nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a Google search. Today we can post a restaurant review while we are enjoying dessert. We also have real-time collaboration through Google Wave which is a crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki.
Location
Location-sharing services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude are now availabe using the GPS in modern smartphones. Location is not about any singular service but it is a new layer of the web.
Augmented reality
Augmented reality (AR) started attracting early-adopter in the latter part of 2009. AR is enabled by GPS, mapping data from sources like Google and using the technology in modern phones, AR is overlaying data on your environment. For example: imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and information about the sights you see.
- Layar - 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.
Content 'curation'
Content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it and "Information overload" is becoming an increasing problem.
How should we allocate our attention? We have millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time.
- Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means.
- Your friends filter information for you in Facebook which allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.
- Google's Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.
- Professional "curation" are experts in the field who direct our attention
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is a trend where 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.
Office Web Apps should be launched in 2010 with the release of Microsoft Office 2010. Office Web Apps will be a free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Google is planning to launch Chrome OS which is 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
Social gaming like Zynga's FarmVille game on Facebook and Playfish was recently acquired by Electronic Arts. Games are spawning virtual currencies and virtual buying and selling.
Mobile payments
Mobile payments market should expand. They already include PayPalX to Amazon's mobile payments platform for developers. Square enables merchants to accept payments via Apple's iPhone.
Privacy Scarcity
We are seeing the 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.
Page last updated: May 31, 2012 14:31 PM
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