5 Internet and Technology Trends in 2010

I think 2009 was a really good year for a lot of tech companies such as Rackspace and 37signals. This only makes me wonder what is going to succeed and make a buzz in 2010. So, here are my thoughts about the technology trends that may impress the near future of 2010.

1. Identity Management

Early 2009, most SaaS providers required the user to “register” or “sign up” in order to provision his account. In a sense, this account was your digital identity at the Service Provider (SP). Therefore, the model was that the SP has also to be your Identity Provider (IdP). The problem with that model is that you can’t re-use this identity in any other SaaS app.

Things started to change a little by mid 2009. Large businesses started to implement identity management standards such as SAML and OpenID. These standards change the model in a way that separates IdP from SP. That way a user can re-use his identity at different SPs which is referred to by Identity Federation.

If you have a single identity, why do you have to relogin at every and each SaaS app you are subscribed to? By late 2009, large companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter started to offer Single Sign-On (SSO) services by which a user would login once and he can access any of his apps. For example, you don’t need to relogin to Google Calendar if you are already logged in Gmail.

I think that there are so many intriguing questions to be answered in 2010. For example, if any, who is going to be the dominant IdP on the internet? Is it Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, someone else? What makes you trust your identity with one IdP instead of another?

I am not starting a debate here, but apparently secure standards such as SAML are complicated and expensive to implement. OpenID is simple and distributed, but not highly matured yet. Are there going to be any new standards? If any, which one is going to be THE standard to follow?

SaaS providers will need to expose their apps a bit more. I think that we’ll see a lot of identity provisioning APIs and standards coming up. User will be able to activate and deactivate any SaaS app easily.

2. Social Media

I believe that Social Media and targeted marketing is how it is going to be in 2010. Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable, found an increase in the number of social media experts from 4,487 in May 2009 to 15,740 today. Obviously, something is going on there.

Rich Wong is one of the top VCs in 2009. Robert Scoble interviewed Rich Wong about his thoughts of 2010. The most interesting part is that Rich Wong thinks that we have only discovered 5% of the potential in social media. Although I would argue that the number is a little too low, we still see a huge opportunity in Social Media. Facebook and Twitter isn’t the end of it — that’s for sure. I highly recommend watching the whole interview.

One of the biggest problems facing social media is finding your target customers. Until now there is no easy and definitive way to find all your target customers in any of the existing social media services. I think that there is a lot more to come here.

3. Mobile

I think we all agree that Steve Jobs changed the game here. Mobile is one of the hottest topics in 2009 and will be in 2010. It is really exciting to think about the opportunities in mobile platforms whether it is open platform such as Android or closed platform such as iPhone.

Integration between phone apps is definitely something we yet need to see grow and mature a lot more. Interacting with different apps should be a seamless, smooth, and logical transition from one app to another. Monetizing on phones will take different shapes with AdMob and Virtual Reality. I expect more context awareness in general.

4. Collaboration

There is a vast amount of information generated everyday. We still need to figure out how to build knowledge from all the information available around us. How to collaborate with others around the knowledge that we have? Google Wave is yet another attempt from Google to address the issue, but there are others.

The revolution in mobile technologies made collaboration more important now than ever. I think that we will see a lot of overlap between Mobile technologies and Collaborative ones. Maybe collaboration won’t be the biggest trend in 2010, but certainly will start spreading awareness of the issues around it and the need for it.

5. Real-Time

Recently, we have seen a number of interesting applications of Real-Time such as Google real-time results and real-time document editing in Etherpad. I think that real-time computing is an underlying technology that should fuel a number of the above mentioned trends and businesses. Here are 5 uses of real-time in different applications.

Exciting times!!!

What do you think will flourish in 2010? What are your comments on the trends mentioned here?

3 Responses to “5 Internet and Technology Trends in 2010”

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2. Google and AdMob vs Apple and Quattro says:

   January 5, 2010 at 12:01 AM

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3. #iwouldhatetobeyou says:

   January 23, 2010 at 2:37 AM

   More power to you.i have actually bookmarked it to show some of my friends

   Reply