10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010

04 Dec 2009

1- Real-time ramps up
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.

2- 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.

3- Augmented reality
t’s yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009.

4- 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.

5- Cloud computing
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.

6- Internet TV and movies
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.

7- Convergence conundrum
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.

8- 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.

9- Mobile payments
I’d wager that 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market.

10- 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.

According to CNN