Web trends in 2010

Web trends in 2010
There are some conspicuous web trends showing up for 2010. As human beings tend to think in threes: the following three promise to be big in 2010: Real-time communication, Internet TV and social gaming.

Online social networking isn’t going to go away.  It’s only going to keep growing at an astronomical rate.

1… Real time web: 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. Social networking sites like face book, twitter and Linked In make it easy to instantly update status, post pictures, write wall posts and respond to interesting facts presented by friends spontaneously and in no time at all. You can share your personal experiences.. review a restaurant, recount your trip to zoo or a Japanese park and share info with your friends who are quick to respond to your experience by commenting on it or liking it with a press of a button.

You can also portray your talents like paintings or articles or blogs and exhibit it before hundreds of your friends and open groups attracting contributions from all. 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?

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.

Internet TV and movies

Is 2010 the year the majority of our television starts coming to us via the Internet? No more waiting for the next sequel of your favorite TV show, you can watch what you want, when ever you are free through Internet TV. Looking at time for your must-see shows is a concept of bygone times. Now Internet allows you access to latest TV shows and movies for free and it is available to see when you are. Could things get any better for the movie and media lovers.

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. You can practice stock trading for free with the help of free cash and mock situations. You can even build another life for yourself on Second Life along similar lines as is exhibited in the movie Avatar. However you have to be careful if your spouse in real life finds out that you have an affair with cartoon from Second life their could be a transgression suit waiting for you.

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 can be outlined in a topic “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 PayPal to Amazon’s mobile payments platform for developers, the big players are seizing the mobile payments opportunity. Mobile banking is an extension of internet banking and the phenomenon started getting very popular in US a couple of years back. A lot of banks in US have already started using mobile banking (using the WAP technology) in a big way. Some of the prominent ones are Citibank, Bank of America, SunTrust and Wachovia.

• Cell phones can be used to make payments
• It is simpler and easier than online banking
• Their will be a standard interface waiving off the use of unnecessary graphics.
• It is secure incase the instrument is lost as data isn’t stored on the phone and information cannot be obtained without an access code, which must be entered each time. The only real danger might be from shoulder surfers (privacy issues).
• It is quick. It is only 3 clicks away to see your account information.
• It is secure as mobile service has 128-bit data encryption, the same level as the existing Internet service.

Reality Stars :

Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We’re all reality stars now, on Face book, 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 Face book and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices. Some of the bad practices of the social media is exposing your private life unabated in social networking sites which can tarnish your career plans or show you in a poor light to employers, family, etc.

The incredible efficiency of Web-based communication and our Google-fueled appetite to know everything about everything (or everyone) leads to continued erosion of privacy — this is expected to be a hot media topic of 2010. With private information so easily accessible, it makes sense make yourself  just a little hard to get in order to void becoming a target of  frauds.