Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010

This text was send in an email from Alvaro Seixas, friend of mine.

Enjoy

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1. Location, Location, Location

The biggest rumble down south was between a pair of location-based gaming services: Austin-based Gowalla and New York-based Foursquare. Both services are similar — users "check in" to real-world locations through their smartphones and are rewarded with badges and discounts for frequenting hotspots. Foursquare is the established favorite and has a larger user base, but Gowalla led a strong insurgency, with a slickly designed iPhone application and a heavy presence at the festival. Who won? We'll call this one a draw, as many festival-goers used both services simultaneously to locate their friends and track down parties.

Gowalla and Foursquare both face the same challenge ahead — breaking outside of the tech-heavy communities on the coasts to become a tool in everyday life. Its not an easy road. The two services must deal with privacy concerns (although they track your location only when you give them permission) while fighting to build partnerships with merchants and brands to help encourage skeptical users to give them a try. But even if these services remain niche distractions, location isn't going away anytime soon. The Web's social giants also want you to start sharing your whereabouts: Twitter has already added the ability to add location to tweets, and Facebook reportedly plans to roll out a similar feature in their status updates before the summer.

2. Building Platforms, Not Websites

Twitter has never been about going to Twitter.com — the website itself is pretty barebones, a fact founder Evan Williams freely admitted in his March 14 SXSW keynote. The microblogging service has gone one step further with their announcement of @Anywhere, a platform to help publishers and web designers build Twitter features into their own websites. The service, which will launch with 13 beta partners including the New York Times and YouTube, lets Twitter users post messages and find new people to follow without ever needing to leave a partner's website.

While details were scant, it is Twitter's first stab at matching the success of Facebook's Connect platform, which lets users sign in and interact with websites using their Facebook profile and data. But Mark Zuckerberg's social giant isn't resting on its laurels either — at an event for Facebook Developers, Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis characterized the company as a "service" rather than a Web destination. If you read between the lines, that means that Facebook is likely going to further de-emphasize the importance of going to Facebook.com and focus on making your Facebook profile a crucial part of everything you do on the Web.

3. Social Gaming

One new area where you'll see Facebook's new platform is in console video games. Developers showed off demos of games that had Facebook Connect built in, allowing you to share scores, statistics and even a personalized gaming highlight reel to your Facebook profile, direct from your Xbox 360 or Playstation. The latest generation of games on Apple's iPhone include the same sort of features, designed to let you share your achievements with friends.

But beyond that, the games themselves will become more social. In 2009, the success of games like Zynga's Farmville (estimated, by some counts, to have more players than Twitter has users) proved to developers that there's a winning strategy in targeting games less to gamers and more to users looking for fun ways to interact with their friends. And Farmville is really only ostensibly social — you can visit your friend's farm and offer rudimentary help, but that's about it. The next generation of online games — like the popular Bejeweled Blitz — will offer richer, more direct competition and game play between users.

4. Augmented Reality

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Conceptually, augmented reality isn't anything new — if you've watched the Olympics or seen a first-down marker during a televised football game, you're familiar with digital overlays enhancing real-life events. But one challenge for 2010 will be harnessing the growing ubiquity of webcams and smartphones to make augmented reality useful as a tool in day-to-day life. One of the best examples yet is the virtual box simulator from the U.S. Postal Service, which taps into your webcam to let you figure out what size box is needed to ship an an item through overlaying a semi-transparent 3D model of the box. Other examples for 2010 range from a John Mayer music videoto Xbox's upcoming Project Natal.

Augmented reality is a hot trend in iPhone apps as well. They include offerings that let shoot you friends with virtual lasers in the iPew application or tracking down your parked car with Car Finder. Gimmicky? A bit. But developers are only just beginning to get a handle on the types of implementations that are possible.

5. Living in the Cloud

Get ready for your files to start living online, rather than on your computer. One of the most highly anticipated speakers at SXSWi was Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, a popular European music service that offers millions of songs streaming on-demand. Launching the service in the U.S. has been complicated by licensing issues with record companies, and there was hope Ek would announce a U.S. launch date at the festival. (He didn't.) Still, the service — and competing U.S. friendly offerings like Mog — manage to make the iTunes model of having a library of downloaded music look downright anachronistic. Who needs to rip CDs or buy songs when nearly any song imaginable is available, providing you have an active Internet connection? The argument becomes even more compelling when mobile applications are taken into account — Mog announced that its app will roll out in spring, with a subscription fee of $10/month.

Expect similar revolutions to take shape in video. Netflix already offers a library of thousands of streaming videos, and Major League Baseball lets subscribers watch any game on-demand. Rumors that cable networks such as ESPN are considering offering themselves through platforms like the Xbox are keeping the idea of taking TV into the cloud on the front burner.

6. Birth of the Backchannel

The growth of sites like Twitter and Facebook has given rise to the idea that events have both a frontchannel (the Super Bowl, for example) and a backchannel (the live, online discussion from fans watching the game.) The next generation of Web-connected TVs and software will include ways for people to monitor and interact with the conversation happening around an event, filtering live streams in real-time to display the most relevant discussions.

It works on a smaller scale. The best example of the power of the backchannel at SXSW was an inadvertent one. An interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams was wrecked by criticism on Twitter. Festival goers were unimpressed with the questions posed to Williams by moderator Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review and tweeted their displeasure before leaving the interview en masse. In a blog post later, Haque said he wished he had been monitoring the Twitter conversation from on stage.

7. Frictionless Payments

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Micropayments were a $1 billion industry in 2009. If they hope to grow in 2010, these types of transactions need to be made easier. One of the slickest implementations was a application from Paypal, which lets users "bump" their iPhones or iPods to authorize a transaction between accounts. Owe a friend for pizza? Click your phones together and the debt's resolved. A startup called Venmo (now in private beta) goes even one step further. Friends can issue payments with text messages or create a special list of people who they trust, who are then allowed to pull money from their account at will.

8. Social Objects

The Web has made people more social. But what about objects? That's the thinking behind Stickybits, a startup launched at SXSW that adds a social layer to barcodes. Using the company's Android or iPhone application, users can scan barcodes, attach a piece of information — either a video, note or audio recording — and receive a notification whenever someone else scans the same object. Stickybits also produces unique, one-off barcodes of its own that, when attached to a postcard, for example, add digital memory to static objects. The company sees the codes being used in everything from product reviews to including a digital copy of your resume on your business card.

9. iPad

The buzz about Apple's upcoming tablet computing device continued at SXSWi. Even though very few in attendance had even held an iPad (the first models will ship in April), there was still a great deal of discussion on how the device would impact gaming, web browsing and print media. With developers still racing to put the first generation of applications together at launch, there were very few concrete examples on hand. One exception? Wired gave a full video demo of how they plan to port their magazine to the iPad, which received an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd on hand.

10. A Richer Web

The most controversial aspect of the iPad is its lack of support for the Flash plugin, a ubiquitous part of the Internet that powers everything from online games to sites like Hulu. Part of the reason Apple thinks it can leave out Flash is that the next generation of web coding, HTML 5, is already in use on the Web. HTML is the language most websites are created in, and this latest generation of standards includes tools for developers to include video on their site and build rich, full-featured online applications without requiring users to download and install a plugin like Flash.

One obstacle to implementation? People who won't upgrade their browsers. Older versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox are still the most popular browsers in use on the web and aren't capable of displaying HTML 5 content. Developers won't be able to include many HTML 5 features in their websites until the vast majority of users upgrade to one of the latest generation of browsers, like Google Chrome or the upcoming Internet Explorer 9.