ReadWriteWeb

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Filtering, harassment, arrest and torture of bloggers and other users of social media will increase exponentially. There has been a geometric increase in the last several years, but I believe this coming years will see every traditional tyranny fully embracing the Chinese model: technical, legal, social oppression online. Most democracies will more closely travel the trail earlier blazed by Australia, sacrificing civil rights to a make-believe safety. The U.S., followed by many European democracies, have been traumatized first by terrorist attacks, and now by Wikileaks, into clamping down, and are edging, however hesitantly by comparison, toward the Chinese model.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Facebook/Google fight turns out well for end users in 2011 as both companies release tools and services to make our lives better, while competing to be the top Web destination worldwide.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: The idea of the "real-time Web" will become the standard as dynamic, real-time content permeates every corner of the Web. Beyond updates, commenting, and news, the movement toward real-time will finally begin to fully realize the connection between the Web and the Internet of Things. Instead of hacks and mashups telling us when the next bus is coming or what point in the journey our package is in, we'll have real-time tracking via RFID or other IOT technologies.

Mobclix, an iPhone analytics firm and mobile ad exchange network, has released a year-end report which examines the top application trends from 2010. The report, called the "2010 App Game Changers," neatly summarizes what have been some of the most notable developments in mobile over the course of the year.

Mobile technology has seen major advances over the course of 2010, with new platforms, new services and new usage trends all taking hold to spread the adoption of not just the mobile Web, but the Web itself. The number of smartphone owners are increasing, mobile operating systems are proliferating and apps have become the new go-to tools for accessing mobile content on the go.

When you look back at the past 12 months, it's almost hard to narrow a list down to only 10 top products, in fact - there's so much innovation happening around mobile today. But we think the list below stands out as representative of the most important products from the year.

Opera Software has released its State of the Mobile Web report for November 2010 today, but has also taken the opportunity to look back at the preceding months to summarize trends and statistics related to global mobile Web usage for 2010. The findings? Mobile Web surfing is way, way up.

Opera served 340 billion pages during the first 11 months of the year compared with only 129 billion pages during the same period in 2009. There are now 80 million users on the mobile Web using Opera's Mini browser - a 91.8% increase from last year. And Facebook and Google are still top Web destinations, but the two have swapped the number 1 and 2 slots as 2010 draws to a close.

Samsung recently announced it expects to sell around 5 million bada-powered handsets by the end of 2010 and that the total number of application downloads in Samsung's app store is expected to surpass 50 million by December. That's an impressive start for a mobile operating system that was only publicly revealed a year ago, where the first bada phone, the Samsung Wave, didn't ship until June, and where the Wave was the only bada phone available until October when additional models were launched.

To put this in perspective, Samsung has been shipping more Wave phones in the past few months since its launch than any other smartphone manufacturer except for Apple with the iPhone. But does that mean developers should now be paying attention to bada?

Last year, when we looked at the top real-time Web products of 2009, we predicted that in 2010 the real-time Web was "likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world". Indeed, as we look back on the last year we find that many of the big innovations in terms of the real-time Web come in the form of implementations by companies like Google and Facebook. At the same time, there are still smaller players in the realm that have changed how (and how fast) we expect information on the Web to move and people interact.

Just a year after companies like Facebook started offering a constantly updated stream of real-time content, we expect no less from nearly any site we visit and soon enough, calling something "real-time" will be like identifying something as "social". With that in mind, let's take a look at the top 10 products, innovations and developments in the world of the real-time Web in 2010.

This week Gartner issued forecasts for both the enterprise SaaS market and the enterprise social software market. Both are predicted to finish 2010 with strong growth and see even more growth next year. Revenue growth in enterprise SaaS and social software is evidence of three of the five biggest enterprise trends of the year: cloud, consumerization and social (the others are analytics and mobile). But some of Gartner's findings are surprising.

With more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets posted on Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views each day on YouTube—, social media has become an integral part of our connected lives. But this is just the beginning.

For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.