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2010 Predictions

Every year the ReadWriteWeb team tries its hand at predicting the future. Looking back at our 2009 predictions, we got some wrong (I predicted that Facebook would sign up to OpenSocial) but others turned out to be on the money. I correctly guessed that the usual suspects would remain unacquired in ‘09 – Digg, Twitter, Technorati – but that FriendFeed would get bought. OK, so I guessed that Google would be the buyer. But close enough!

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We’d love to read your predictions in the comments.

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Richard MacManus, Founder & CEO

1. There will be a breakthrough consumer application for Internet of Things – involving the iPhone, RFID tags and a major consumer product such as books or groceries. In general Internet of Things will ramp up in 2010, with thousands more
everyday objects becoming connected to the Internet.

2. Google will acquire PostRank and promptly consign it to the same graveyard Feedburner went to.

3. Microsoft will acquire Wolfram|Alpha and Bing will continue to make small gains in the search market. Google will be distracted by increasing consumer complaints about content farms polluting Google search results.

4. A price war will erupt in the eBook market and Amazon.com will offer the lowest prices, leading to it gaining a dominant position in the market with its Kindle eBook Reader.

5. Google will partner with a large PC manufacturer from Asia, who will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by Chrome OS in the U.S. market. It will become a hot consumer item among school kids and university students.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer & VP Content Dev

1. Google Wave will win some respect back as people discover valuable uses for it and get used to the user experience.

2. Facebook will open aggregate user profile and social graph data for outside analysis.

3. Some serious user interface innovations will blow our minds.

4. Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable.

5. A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from, it may be mobile and location-centric, it may focus on personal content recommendations.

Sarah Perez, Feature Writer

1. MySpace doesn’t quite make a comeback, but gets a fresh start of sorts with their music and entertainment offerings. The Gen Y/Gen Z demographic sees growth on the site but the network’s overall numbers continue to decline.

2. Twitter launches ads.

3. TweetDeck finally launches a web version and becomes the number 1 Twitter client other than twitter.com.

4. Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.

5. The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before.

6. Meanwhile, Android becomes the #2 mobile platform by year-end.

7. iPhone App backlash begins. There are too many worthless apps and no decent way to find the good ones. Then Apple surprises us with a brand-new feature that improves greatly upon their “genius” offering to help us find new and useful apps via iTunes.

8. iTunes announces a web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition.

9. Spotify finally gets the green light in U.S. and people go nuts for it.

10. The netbook craze dies down. People start buying new “in-between” devices that are slightly larger and more powerful than today’s netbooks – but smaller, more lightweight and cheaper than regular notebooks. Features like better processors, separate GPUs, and SSD HD options set these new “ultra portable” devices apart from the traditional netbook, but they’re still often called “netbooks” because of their size. Market confusion ensues.

Jolie O’Dell, Writer & Community Manager

1. MySpace relaunches as a content network, leveraging the bands and filmmakers they already have on board and dropping the emphasis on social networking.

2. Twitter will find a monetization model and launch things like ads and pro features.

3. Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with “the Internet.” They’ll make more money and control more data than ever before.

4. iPhone’s exclusivity with AT&T will come to a breaking point and we’ll see network-agnostic iPhones.

5. On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they’re asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn’t the Internet know they have a Facebook?

6. File-sharing will continue to be shut down around the world; by 2011, we’ll all be downloading via Tor and the U.S. will have instituted a lame 3-strikes-no-Internet policy.

7. Cybercrime will be more of an issue than ever. Expect to see a major governmental security breach in 2010, as the government continues to adopt 2.0 tech without strong and permanent infosec personnel and procedures in place.

Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart Writer

1. AR: Geo-locational games and AR will come together in 2010. We’re going to see strange behavior from those playing zombie shooter games on their commutes.

2. Agree with Sarah: Netbooks and gadgets like the PsiXpda are going to gain ground.

3. Mobile Music: Offline music caching will be expected of all streaming music apps.

4. The browser really will be the new OS.

5. Payment Systems: Between Square, PayPal X and advances in internet TV, we’re going to see payment options integrated in unlikely places.

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise Writer

1. Cloud computing will go through a shake-out. There are just too many companies out there for the market to sustain. The big players will go on a buying spree. The consolidation will deeply affect users. Some companies will fold overnight. Users will lose access to their data, leading to a whole new wave of skepticism about cloud computing. But it won’t be enough to slow down the move to cloud computing. More companies will consider the security risks as less of a factor, compared to the cost benefits and potential for innovation. Cloud computing technology will become more of a commodity. The business applications for cloud computing will take center stage.

2. The big players will come back strong. IBM, SAP and Microsoft will innovate just enough to show big gains with customers.

3. Consumer based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of “social middleware,” services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise.

4. A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market.

5. iPhone, Android or the Blackberry? I expect the Android to be the talk of the enterprise, especially if the Google Phone does make it to market. Such a phone would eliminate carrier costs and break down walled gardens that have limited application development.

Sean Ammirati, COO

1. Facebook will go public & the IPO will be a huge financial success.

2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry’s coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper.

3. Apple will release an “iTablet” and the world will be a better place for it. Ok, more accurately we’ll all think the world is a better place for it.

4. Agree with Jolie regarding “the death of the login.” I’m hoping for open distributed alternatives along with Facebook and a handful of others.

5. Between Boxee’s continued development and a new AppleTV (hopefully synched with their iTablet), it will become much more common to enjoy the Internet on a TV.

Elyssa Pallai, Marketing & Experience Manager

1. Skype becomes increasingly pervasive, as the younger generations force their parents to get online and consumers find new and interesting ways to cut costs and save money.

2. Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud – including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching.

3. The online user experience has a renaissance, as web browsers and hardware become more sophisticated and designers / developers take advantage of that.

4. The growth of Internet of Things continues, RFID tags in everything. The initial bugs will make funny things happen all around us.

5. iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice.

6. Consumers bypass carriers and create open wifi networks for all (which is already happening but not en mass).

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Backlash against the App Store causes more and more developers to defect to Android and competing platforms.

2. Google Chrome’s market share increases at Firefox’s expense. Internet Explorer continues to lose ground as more rich, HTML5-aware Web apps spring up on the scene.

3. Opera begins to struggle, as WebKit becomes the rendering engine of choice on mobile devices.

4. Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product.

Discuss

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Week in review: Crunchpad renamed JooJoo, Google adds real-time search results

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Crunchpad manufacturer renames product JooJoo, promises launch this Friday at $499 — The CrunchPad was the tablet computer being built by TechCrunch with production contractor Fusion Garage. But the companies had a falling out (whose details remain murky), and now Fusion Garage is trying to sell the device on its own. The JooJoo site is accepting pre-orders, despite a lawsuit filed by TechCrunch.

Americans consume 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information per year, not counting work — The average American sucks down 34 gigabytes of data per day, half of that from video games, says the latest update of a study by two researchers at the University of California in San Diego.

11 things I didn’t know about app development — The “I” in question is VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin, who summarize the surprising things he learned while attending VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2009 event, where experts discussed how mobile and social applications can stand out in an age of noise.

How to fail … gloriously — This post features a video of Eric Ries (of Startup Lessons Learned) discussing how and why a company failed despite five years of work, a talented staff, and $40 million of venture capital.

Seagate finally makes move from hard drives to flash storage — After two years of study, the hard drive maker is launching a new flash memory storage business, one of its most significant expansions in years.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Google adds real-time search to its results page — Google search results are about to speed up, with what the company says is “the first time ever any search engine has integrated the real-time web into the results page.” The search giant announced the news Monday, saying it planned to roll out the feature gradually, and it looks like it’s live in the United Kingdom.

CES expected to be a smaller trade show this year, but still full of innovation – The International Consumer Electronics Show, the biggest geek fest in North America, has been shrinking thanks to the severity of the recession and its impact on travel plans. But the show’s organizer, Gary Shapiro said in an interview that this year’s show should be stronger than last year’s.

Hot air: Sarah Palin slams climate change summit — The former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the summit in Copenhagen was a sign that science is being politicized at the expense of average Americans. We summarize Palin’s article, as well as some of the responses in the media.

Le Web: Q & A with Twitter, Square creator Jack Dorsey — Dorsey was interviewed on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris, where he discussed the early days of Twitter, as well as his plans for his new mobile payments startup Square.

Music video supersite Vevo launches into a sea of fans, crashes — The site is a venture between Google-owned YouTube and the music industry to place YouTube-powered music videos in one spot — with higher-end advertising to monetize it. However, the site was incredibly slow on launch day, and it posted a message on Twitter saying it couldn’t keep up with traffic.

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Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook?

Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.

Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.

The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.

Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.

Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.

For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”

Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.

When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.

Update: And now it’s live.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Google Continues To Feed The PubSubHubbub. Google Alerts Now In Real-Time.

When PubSubHubbub launched at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, pretty much everyone in the audience immediately recognized it as a very cool thing. Basically, it takes any feed and significantly speeds up the time it takes to be found by various sources using new hubs that specifically gather that information. But the biggest fan of it may be the company that employs the two who created it, Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick: Google.

Today, Google has announced yet another service that is PubSubHubbub-compatible: Google Alerts. That’s huge not just because alerts can now appear in real-time in feed readers, but also because developers can now write applications that take advantage of getting pinged immediately when a new result for a certain query show up in Google Search results, as Slatkin notes today on the Google Code Blog. “Think of it as an AJAX search API that tells *you* when it finds new results. Acting upon these notifications your app could update your website, email friends, send an SMS — the possibilities are endless,” Slatkin writes.

Slatkin hopes that new breeds of applications are created based on the protocol. That could well happen, but for now, Google seems to content to use it on an increasing number of their products. Aside from Google Alerts, PubSubHubbub is already working on FeedBurner, Google Reader Shared Items and Blogger. As Fitzpatrick noted at our event, “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.” Google may not be the center of the world for PubSubHubbub, but it is the key cog moving it forward for now.

So what Google product may be next to turn on PubSubHubbub? Here’s a list of possible ones, Slatkin pointed us to, noting that many are far from certain at this point still.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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