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Yahoo has released its year-end list of top Web searches, which identify the trends form the past year. There are a number of lists available, including the top overall searches, top searches by country and top searches in a number of verticals, like finance, sports, questions and "obsessions" (hot items throughout the year).

But we're most interested in the top mobile searches, of course, and how those search trends compare to Web search in general.

As part of our ongoing year-end analysis of what shaped the Web this year, we've created a report - The Top 5 Web Trends of 2010 - that looks at the most important topics: mobile, the Internet of Things, location-based social networks, the real-time Web, and structured data. Using Adobe's new PDF Portfolio, we take you back through the year's news and events and then describe what the key issues to watch in 2011 will be.

Here's a brief preview of what's inside the report:

Consumers under 35 - that is, those in Generations X and Y, the latter also referred to as "millennials" - tend to prefer using mobile applications over Web browsers on smartphones, as compared with older mobile users, a new study shows. Data collected by market research and consulting firm Parks Associates, found that this young demographic is starting to ditch the Web browser in favor of apps, and are especially put off by mobile websites not designed for the small screen.

This week, Nokia provided an update on its Ovi Store's momentum, in terms of downloads. The company said it's now seeing 3 million application downloads per day, up from 2 million back in September. Over the past 12 months, 400,000 new developers have joined its Forum Nokia developer network and its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) has been downloaded 1.5 million times. What's more, 92 developers have even seen their apps downloaded over a million times.

All these statistics point to one thing, says Nokia: turnaround is happening.

The Strange Loop Conference in St. Louis, MO hosted a panel on the Future of Programming Languages last month. The participants discussed trends they'd seen in programming languages lately, type checking, proving code correctness, programming education and more. Today, InfoQ posted a video of the panel.

Mobile browser maker Opera has released its latest report on the mobile Web and this time it's come to a conclusion you'll arrive at soon enough as the family gathers for the holidays and everyone under 30 has their nose buried in a mobile phone - "Generation Y chooses the mobile Web".

In fact, most 18-27 year-olds surveyed in the report user their mobile phones to browse the Web more often than a desktop or laptop. The report offers a number of telling statistics on where the world is headed and it all boils down to one word - mobile.

As we said last week, it's prediction season. We've kicked off our own trends to watch series, but we also wanted to check in with what the analyst firms are saying. Forrester, Gartner and ZapThink have all published their own trend watch-lists. Common themes include cloud computing, mobility and analytics.

Who will win the smartphone race and how will they get there? Who will end up controlling the user experience on the device - the manufacturers or the operating system makers? These were the sort of questions being discussed on a panel at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco last week. On hand were several executives from device makers themselves, including HTC, Samsung and Motorola.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding location-based services in the past months, much of it centered on the so-called "check-in" applications - the apps that allow users to register their location at a particular venue using a mobile social networking type service like Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, SCVNGR and others.

But until now, these apps have been considered more hype than bite. A new study released today seems to state otherwise.

It's prediction season on the Internet, and today's dose of futurism comes from security firm Imperva. The company just released its Security Trends for 2011 paper. Among other things, Imperva predicts consolidation of the cyber-crime industry, convergence in international privacy and data security laws, and more state-sponsored cyber-attacks targeted at private industry.