10 Web Industry Trends for 2010

Jan 21, 2010 08:30 GMT  ·  By

We resisted the temptation of putting together a “Top of 2009...” article, but the excitement of what 2010 has started to bring made us take a look at the most anticipated events and trends about to descend upon us this year. Important things will happen on the web this year too, and some of them will change it forever.

The last decade was very fruitful, bringing us inventions and applications like free email (thank you, Gmail), touch technology (hail the iPhone) and many friends (aka social networks). Websites like Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Google and Yahoo revolutionized the Internet, taking small steps in digitizing and in the education of the entire world. But we will not spend our time praising the past, because this editorial is all about the future.

There are a couple of trends and domains we will touch in this article. The first of them would be about the direction the industry and major companies seem to be heading, taking up topics and trends ranging from business plans and strategies to financial deals. Then, we will talk about design trends. Even if there are more than 1,000 similar articles on the web in this period of this year, we've spent some of our time looking over many of them and building a little summary to let you, the reader, know what the majority of the industry experts are thinking about the design market. We will end the article with some trends expected to pop on the programming & development scene.

10 Top Web Industry Trends for 2010

Real-Time Searches Take Over

Judging by the amount of money real-time search providers have been racking up lately, and the attention Google has given to the Twitter deal, it's likely that a more visible line will appear between real-time searches and information queries on all search providers. Because in many case studies, real-time searches provide more accurate results to users than a regular search query, this domain will receive extra care.

This domain will also see an increase in attention, because it still provides companies plenty of opportunities and chances for building new markets and capitalizing in a raw sector.

Facebook Continues Growth Period

In the last years, we've seen Facebook not only make its user base grow, but develop an image where it's OK to have a social network account even if you are the owner of a major business. This marketing strategy did not only enlarge its possible user base, but made it universally cool in any age gap.

Facebook managed to bring together MySpace's teen user base, Twitter's average 40+ users and Linkedin's business appeal. Even if not a real growth, we expect a major expansion from Facebook in the following year, and if they are not all real-life users, than we see regular users pop up across the site, as they showed up on other networks in the past (MySpace, Hi5) and artificially enhance user statistics.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, has said more than once that their target is the 500 million users mark, don't expect them to reach it in 2010. A more likely year would be 2011, 2012 or never.

Free Online TV & Music Go Extinct

While Spotify is in the center of the monetization process across the web, Hulu is also taking advantage of the user's slouchiness, providing view-on-request / pay-per-view TV shows and movies for North American users.

We believe the success of these kind of services will only push other free music storage services to go commercial and start charging small (or bigger) fees depending on their track/movie database.

Meanwhile, video streaming services have expanded out of their “View My Webcam” territory and are now providing quality services to TV re-transmissions. The copyright holders are not happy about the way sites like Justin.TV, Ustream and Veetle have evolved, but users couldn't care less about that. Judging by the pressure Justin.TV has been put under lately, we can only expect them to limit or take severe measures against users broadcasting illicit material. In the end, try to avoid Mininova's faith, which was forced by a court order to remove all copyright infringing torrents.

File Sharing Will Have to Evolve

We all remember that soon after the Internet evolved into the social phenomenon it is today, someone quickly found a way to share data across the network for free. The protocol was called P2P and spurred the birth of torrent trackers and DC hubs across the world.

In its most successful year since it started the fight against online pirates, the MPAA managed to close down during 2009 the most accessed trackers in the world: The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

If online pirates want to have any “liberty” in exchanging copyrighted files, their methods need to evolve, and do so quick. As time passes by, the MPAA and police experts are inventing and learning new ways to stop this phenomenon, and not only on the technical side. Lawyers have found a legal loophole and are using it in taking down all illegal websites.

It is clear that the battle will never be won on the legal stage, so the best way to survive is for pirates to find a way to mask their illegal activities. Their future will rely only on this. Expect no sympathy and help in Hollywood legal departments or from a court anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, we recommend taking a look at magnet links as a possible alternative for classic torrent files. They still rely on P2P, but provide a little more of anonymity.

Google Will Need a Bigger Safe

Or maybe some more bank accounts. The ads have started to pop up more regularly in YouTube videos and this will mean one thing: “more money in Google's pockets.”

PS: I forgot about Nexus One and the real-time search engine implemented with Twitter. These ventures will surely bring new cash sources to the company as well.

Desktop Software Migrates to the Web

The biggest indicator for this was when we discovered the wonderful app called DropBox. After installing and using it, we realized that “there is no desktop software (spoon).” Software these days is made to connect to the web, and vice-versa.

By simply going through some web-based applications that we've indexed for the Softpedia Scripts section, we realized that more and more web scripts and online services were performing tasks initially performed by powerful desktop software. Some examples of usage can be found for online image editing, file anti-virus scanning or document handling.

If you want to know where this can go, we recommend visiting the available jobs/projects pages on sites like Elance or Rent-A-Coder. Some of the strangest and more complex projects can be found there, many of them being web implementations of simple desktop software.

Online Marketplaces Boom

In a time when the financial crisis was declared as gone away, the good times still elude our sight. People without a job or freelancers have turned their sights to the web. Because setting up your own web page or online business is more difficult than it looks, and SEO provides a headache bigger than anyone is willing to take, the interest has shifted to online marketplaces.

This is not limited to websites only. People will often use these websites to buy and sell any type of product and service, ranging from stock photos, website templates, clothes to on-demand copywriting.

Companies like Guru, Envato, Elance, GetAFreelancer, ODesk, Flickr, DeviantArt, Stock.Xchng, iStockphoto and much more provide tools for regular people to sell their services online in a period where jobs are hard to find. Expect even more websites like these and in many more domains to pop up around the web.

The current marketplace list is long, so if you're reading this article and want a certain range of services (no matter how strange and niche they can be), we recommend Googling your business. There are big chances that a common place exists on the web where similar professionals like you meet with potential clients and reach deals or working arrangements.

Monetization Becomes a Priority

We'll continue the ideas from the previous point. The general consensus has certainly evolved from the point it was few years ago. In those days, people starting online ventures were considered and looked at as “smart and innovative,” searching to expand their company's horizons or enter new markets. I have never heard any of my friends talking about starting an online company.

These days, everybody's got them. There are websites for everything and this trend will continue to grow. Developed countries like USA, EU states, Canada or Australia are over-saturated, and many of these companies are realizing it. Having reached a stalemate in money income, some of them have started localizing their online business in under-developed and third-world countries.

This will not only increase their revenue, but will contribute in bringing “real” online services to areas of the Globe where the Internet got stuck in time at the start of the 2000's. There is a real culture in building and offering online products in the previously mentioned countries, and the rest of the world can online benefit from that experience.

As the economic crisis hangs around, look for more and more business ventures to go online (due to reduced costs), or some big online providers to attack more local or niche markets to counteract the stoppage or decline in business profits due to the current business conditions.

Indexes Get More Attention

A definition must be provided first. An index website is a website where content from a certain domain of activity is inventoried and classified for later querying by website visitors. As an example, we, Softpedia, are an index. We index software and provide details about them to our visitors.

The world is getting lazier by the minute, and while Google has become more and more accurate in its results, it's easier to find something when somebody has looked over it, tested it and categorized it for you.

So, expect growth in traffic for websites like Wikipedia (and the rest of the Wikimedia network), CNet, Craiglist and more.

Google in a Head Collision with Microsoft

Google Chrome OS is expected to come out as a more complete system in 2010. Microsoft's Office Web Apps is expected to go out of beta testing with the release of Office 2010. These are some of the most important events this year. Doesn't this seem like a silent war for you? Even if PR departments have kept it quiet, and critics are waiving it off as not an option for the two companies, I'll go with common sense and state the obvious: the companies are going at each other with all they’ve got.

In 2009, we saw a big and successful swing from Microsoft at Google's search monopoly, but that was only the beginning. 2010 will see interesting battles being waged by the two companies for web-based office utilities and the OS market. In my opinion, Windows will remain the OS of the present, but its domination will be tested in the future with Google deciding to invest in that sector. Meanwhile, the online office tools provided by Google seem to have an advantage, but don't count out the master of this domain. Microsoft is the favorite in this battle too thanks to its significant experience in office tools.

This editorial is followed by two more parts about top design and programming trends.

Part II is here. Part III is here.

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