Here’s what I predicted for 2010 and the outcome as of the end of the year:

1. Myspace will die. Like a bad rash, MySpace is hard to eliminate. The site has been rebranded as “My___” — dumb branding that’s in the same league with The Gap’s short-lived new logo. Myspace is still being (ab)used by bands and musicians, comedians, C-list actors, “models” and other celebrity wannabes, as well as by people who didn’t get the memo that Myspace is dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if Myspace limped quietly through 2011 and finally expired. In order to survive, Myspace needs to create something truly new, engaging, user-friendly, and groundbreaking, but I don’t think it will happen. Facebook has taken over the space like the 800-pound gorilla it is.

2. Virtual goods: insanely popular. Huge. Bigger now than a year ago. You’re making a mistake if you think virtual goods are nothing more than “playing games.” A 2009 report from Inside Network put revenue from the purchase of virtual goods in online games at $1 billion. Their prediction is that the U.S. virtual goods market will reach $2.1 billion in 2011. Even if you don’t understand why people adopt and purchase virtual goods, those numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

3. Gaming: Not just for kids. This trend is still heading up, up, up. You’re missing the boat if you think casual and social game-playing is a passing fad. According to a study by market researcher the NPD Group, 56.8 million U.S. consumers have reported playing a game on a social network. That’s 20 percent of the U.S. population. In their report “The Future of Social Gaming 2011,” Inside Network predicts the social gaming market will reach $1.25 billion.

4. Twitter: Transforming communications. Yes, still doing it. At the same time, Facebook is transforming the way we view privacy, and what, how, and how much personal information we share.

5. Niche networks: Good for marketing. I’m still convinced that niche networks are valuable for smaller, more concentrated and highly targeted numbers. Get beyond the giddiness of having hundreds or thousands of “likers” on your Facebook Page, and you can create real value for your company, customers, vendors or targeted consumers by using niche networks. Industry-specific social networks are good for professional networking and information exchange, while open, relevantly-themed social networks are helpful for marketing, branding, and customer interactions. Despite Ning no longer offering free networks, I find that many niche, topic-specific custom networks are still being built on the Ning platform. But running your own niche network is a beast to build and manage without resources. That’s why Facebook Pages are the low-hanging fruit of niche, branded communities.

6. Augmented reality: Really here. Yes, it is here, but still on the fringe. I think 2011 will see mobile devices more capable of supporting AR, programmers developing useful AR applications, and marketers testing the space. AR will become more widespread, and really great and useful applications will proliferate. The next step will be to get consumers on board.

7. Google Buzz: Hmmm. I thought Google Buzz would be big and important because Google is big. Google Buzz is still out there, but I don’t see much buzz about it, and I barely use or notice it myself. Do you have any interesting use cases for Google Buzz?

8. Mobile. Be there. That’s what I’m still saying. I’ve outlined a few things to consider about mobile in a recent post. And don’t just think about devices, apps, and networks, but also communications and commerce.

5 More Trends to Watch in 2011

Before throwing out some ideas for this year, I want to first say that the trends above (other than Google Buzz) aren’t over yet. Each continues to evolve over time with greater adoption, better applications, and solid case studies. So, in 2011, the above trends will solidify into the mainstream of our technology landscape (some more than others).

Here are some more trends to watch for this year, in no particular order:

1. Location, location, location. This should have been on my 2010 list, but it was still early. Within months after my trends post, location exploded and I professed my love for Whrrl, Foursquare and the like, and I was recently blown away by Glyph Glympse: tip of iceberg stuff. I constantly use AroundMe and have started to use Foodspotting when I travel. And have you seen Path?

2. Semantic technologies. Hard for the layperson to grasp, but the applications will continue to improve and impress. Imperfect but interesting: Qwiki, iGlue, Wolfram Alpha, Evri.

3. Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdproducing. You ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of what crowds can do. Real time traffic from Waze, crowdfunding through Kickstarter and Profounder, and many more examples not yet built will be transforming business, creativity, production, process.

4. QR Codes. I’m still wrapping my head around them, but they are worth watching, learning more about, and using.

5. iPad (and other tablets). I’ll be honest: I don’t love my iPad. But really, it isn’t a lack of love for the device, which is sleek and uber-portable. The applications don’t do it justice. You can’t just port what was on the computer to the iPhone and then to the iPad. You have to think different. In 2011, some companies will do just that.

6. Apps commerce and communities. When was the last time you bought software in a box? That activity will continue to decrease. I’m pretty sure the Apple App Store will have plenty of competition cropping up in the next year, including the Chrome Web Store, Google Apps Marketplace, and all the mobile device-specific stores, as well as apps communities like OneForty.com. Developers will have more and more outlets for different versions of the apps they’re producing. Marketers will get into the game as well.

Way into the future? I know 2011 isn’t the year, but soon, touch screens will be the norm. My own four-year-old daughter touches every screen she sees, because she has no concept that not every screen operates like an iPod, iPhone or iPad. Soon she won’t have to look at me after touching the television screen to say “Mommy, it’s not working.”

What trends are you watching in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user clix

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

If the advances of the past couple of decades have told us anything, it’s that we probably can’t accurately predict the future, especially when it comes to technology. But that doesn’t mean we can’t prognosticate about general trends that might help us prepare for what’s to come.

Google Wave, but Better

Some would argue that Google Wave was the biggest online tech disappointment of the last year. It received a fair amount of hype prior to its launch, and at first just getting into the initial beta made people feel a sense of privilege and entitlement. That sense of entitlement quickly turned sour, at least in my experience and the experience of the vast majority I’ve talked to about Wave.

Google Wave itself may be a disappointment, but that doesn’t mean the hearts and minds of the team behind it weren’t in the right place. Thinking about the next step beyond email is a natural enough progression, and it’s likely that that next step will be more interactive, both between people and across media, which Google Wave most definitely is. People who think Internet communication reached its zenith with email are the same type of person who preferred the fax machine and the telegraph to their successors.

I imagine the future of the web to be built around context-based nodal communication, sort of like what’s starting to happen with Twitter and Facebook integration in blog commenting systems. I’ve no idea what the final shape of this kind of communication will look like, but it should benefit working only by emphasizing relevance and relationships over other concerns, like etiquette and immediacy.

Distributed Becomes De Facto

It’s already starting among call centers and other similar businesses operating in North America, at least, and pretty soon other employers will catch on to the fact that running a distributed operation instead of maintaining a physical office saves time and money.

That means we’ll see a lot more remote workers in the near future, culminating in a workplace that is completely home and coworking space-based by the end of the decade. It may seem hard to believe at this point, but think about how far we’ve come in this regard to date, and what people would’ve thought about it ten or twenty years ago.

Death of the Desktop

Well, not the surface itself, but the desktop computer, for all but extremely specialized usages. I realize the irony of predicting this while typing on my iMac, which I absolutely love and much prefer to my notebook computers. The fact is, though, that external monitors can now pretty much replicate all the convenience features that result in my iMac preference. I would much rather spend as much money as I can on one computer and have it suit all my needs, than spread it around to multiple, less ideal machines.

If anything, people will move more and more towards a notebook/netbook or notebook/tablet working configuration. The slate is the hottest new form factor in computing today, and though we haven’t yet had a chance to see how consumers will respond to the new, super portable touch-screen devices, I predict they will catch on quite quickly.

Greater portability will mean that business and public spaces will cater more to mobile workers, and we should be able to find a place fairly easily to plug in and reap the advantages of being able to work from wherever we are without diminished capacity. Picture a Starbucks with secondary monitors built-in to the walls and surfaces.

No Flying Cars

These predictions may seem bold, but I’m not suggesting we’ll be zipping around on sky highways here. There’s already precedents for each of the things mentioned above, and all I’m really doing is following the current trajectory of a few trends to their natural endpoint.

Where do you see web working ten years from now?

Image Credit: Lugi Novi

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

One of the people that I talked to at Beer and Blog was Jason Mauer, Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and @jasonmauer on Twitter; he says:

“I follow Twitter for the conversation anyway, and have found it’s mostly duplicative to also follow the blog feeds of people I’m already following on Twitter. If they post something, I’ll usually hear about it in a tweet.

Where Twitter really pays off is through the power of social networking — interesting content surfaces naturally from people’s recommendations. I might not know that blogger at all who just wrote a really great post, but I’ll hear about it via retweeting. People I follow deliver content piping hot right to my desk. And unlike RSS, Twitter is two-way — the discussion is right there. I get more bang for the buck spending the precious resource that is attention on Twitter than on an RSS reader, which feels like a chore in comparison.”

Mike McClure, strategy and governance consultant and @mcclure on Twitter, says:

“I use twitter in lieu of an RSS reader for productivity and efficiency reasons. All but one of my news sites make announcements on Twitter anyway, so I don’t need to check yet another news source. If the news is big enough, it’ll be circulated enough that I’ll find out soon enough anyway. I’m an analyst not a reporter, so being first to see the news is less important to me than seeing a broad set of thoughts and opinions about the same news.

For real-time information there’s Twitter, for everything else there’s Google.”

McClure also mentioned that Twitter lists might make it even easier to use Twitter to keep up on news, since you can categorize groups of Twitter accounts to create news lists for even easier access to news feeds on Twitter.

These conversations got me thinking about how my use of RSS readers has changed. I am still an obsessive user of RSS, but the feeds that I check most often aren’t news related. I have feeds for Yahoo Pipes that track mentions of all my various projects, clients and other important information, and I regularly read feeds that have unique content that I wouldn’t otherwise find (web comics, niche blogs, online community content, etc.) However, I read my news feeds or mainstream blog feeds much less often than before. Most of the news that I would get from technology blogs has already been discussed and linked on Twitter by the time I get to it in my RSS reader, so I rarely need to read my news feeds.

The feedback on Twitter (as Twitter doesn’t store tweets indefinitely this link may not work in the future) shows that many people are replacing RSS readers with Twitter, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

As you can see, quite a few people have reduced their use of RSS readers, but like most trends, it isn’t universal. There are plenty of people — like me — who still use RSS readers for some feeds, but there are other people who have actually increased their RSS reading as a result of Twitter. The increased usage seems to fall into two categories: People who read Twitter in their RSS reader, and people who run across new things that they then add to their RSS reader.

Has Twitter changed the way you use an RSS reader?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

“Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow.”

Photo by Ste3ve

Godin also points out that this will be a stressful time as many people struggle to find essential, valuable work that is less likely to be outsourced to other locations. This isn’t really a new feature of the work landscape. Peter Drucker was talking about the focus on knowledge workers from the 1950s, and outsourcing has also been a concern for many years.

While outsourcing isn’t new, the rapid increase in the number of remote workers is. According to WorldatWork, “the number of employee telecommuters in the U.S. increased 39 percent, from 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008.” Businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working as it lowers overheads — see Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required). Anecdotally, I seem to see more and more people working remotely from home offices and coffee shops.

What does all of this mean for us? As a culture in the U.S., we have moved away from a traditional worker mindset where 9-to-5 office jobs were intended to last for decades and many aspects of our lives were tied up with our employer (pensions, health insurance, etc.). Now we need to embrace a freelancer mindset, with a focus on the work rather than the employer.  This puts many additional burdens on the worker: health care and retirement, for example. Work may last only days, weeks or months, rather than years, and we need to be able to demonstrate our value regardless of whether we are working remotely or in a cubicle. We need to be flexible and ready to embrace new jobs, new work, new technologies and new business models at any time.

I always try to keep an eye on the future by looking for new opportunities and clients. I also make sure that I’m keeping my skills fresh by learning about new technologies and continuing to tweak the services that I offer for clients as the business environment changes.

What do you do to prepare for changes in your work life?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

But it’s easy to get so caught up in keeping current that we forget to keep the focus on productivity, where it should rightly remain. We can have all the tools and gadgets under the sun, but that won’t necessarily make us effective resources for our clients.

The problem really came home to me recently when I realized I was eagerly awaiting my new Eee PC so that I could get out and explore some co-working with friends. It struck me as painfully similar to the time when I was eagerly awaiting my new Wacom Cintiq 12WX so that I could begin doing freelance illustration in earnest. And that was similar to the time that I was eagerly awaiting the release of Adobe CS4, so that I could finally purchase the Classroom in a Book series and begin supplementing my self-taught proficiency.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was clearly waiting and anticipating much more than I was doing and producing. A quest for the best tools had become an excuse to indulge that most dangerous of professional vices: procrastination. Drastic measures were in order. Hence the following rules:

Rule 1: If you have what you need to do something, regardless of whether or not you might be able to do it better with something new or upcoming, do it.

I call this the Robinson Crusoe rule. The key is to stop thinking of your goals as inextricably tied to software and hardware beyond your reach. Freelancers, and freelance web workers, are valued most for their innovative solutions, not for their ability to rack up huge amounts of additional IT spend. Do what you can with what’s on the island; don’t sit back and wait for rescue.

Rule 2: Every once in a while, take a “Paper Day”

A Paper Day is sort of like a personal day, except you’re still working, you’re just working differently. When I take one of these days, I am not allowed to touch a computer for professional purposes unless absolutely necessary. I often take a Paper Day on the weekend, to avoid spot requests from clients. Writing longhand flexes different muscles, and helps me escape the boxed-in thinking repetitious digital work lends itself to. Plus, there are activities like brainstorming that I still find much more productive and enjoyable on paper.

Rule 3: Set up an IT refresh schedule, like those employed by private companies and corporations.

To prevent a passion for staying ahead of the curve from becoming a daily distraction, I’ve found it helpful to establish a schedule for reviewing, purchasing, and implementing new hardware and software into my workflow. I borrowed the tactic from the small consulting firm I used to work for full-time. They would review and make changes to their IT spend twice yearly, at regularly scheduled intervals. For my own purposes, a quarterly review seems to work best. And, of course, you always have to allow for unexpected purchases (to replace broken hardware, perhaps) and upgrades, as long as they’re actually necessary.

The temptation of shiny new things is a hard one to resist, especially for those of us so steeped in the tech world. Nor should we resist it all of the time, since really, it often represents our bread and butter. Yet we do need to establish boundaries, in order to make sure that the tech we use serves to bolster, not interfere with, our productivity.

How do you ensure the lure of new tech doesn’t impact on your productivity?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.

For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.

The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.

Part of my work day, everyday, is uncompensated. It involves building my personal brand through any number of activities, including Tweeting, blogging, commenting, and writing for friends’ websites. The idea being, of course, that all of these things represent a certain kind of investment.

But is that really the reason I do these things, or is it just an excuse that makes it seem more reasonable in a money-based society? If I look closer at the sorts of activities I do everyday without expecting any kind of immediate or directly correlated rewards, I’m less sure of my motivations. If I’m honest, many of the things I do, I do to earn the respect of my peers, first and foremost.

There’s no doubt that it also helps build my personal brand, but the point is that that isn’t the driving factor behind it. There’s even a huge chunk of work that I would probably grow tired of if it were compensated monetarily. The dangled carrot of eventual respect is what keeps me at it, and for some projects, there is no better motivator, in my opinion.

How much of your day would say is taken up with uncompensated web work? What do you see as your motivation for doing these things? What do you think about companies trying to capitalize on this kind of labor?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Despite my ever expanding list of folks I follow, I know I am only seeing a portion of what is being said. So I am rather intrigued by a new project called Connect the Tweets. Connect the Tweets collects the top trending items on Twitter and attempts to put them into perspective and context. What is this and why is it trending? These are then posted on the site or more conveniently, distributed back out via Twitter by @cttweets.

It’s a simple concept with a simple implementation that creates a Twitter ticker of sorts. By distilling the massive number of simultaneous conversations happening into useful nuggets, it helps me filter out some of the noise while still allowing me to discover and the conversations that are of interest and importance to me. While Twitter’s own search also presents the top trends, I appreciate that the way that Connect the Tweets turns this discovery process into an effortless one for me.

How do you follow Twitter trends?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

The bottom-line number from this particular survey is simple: 62% of all employed American adults can be considered “networked workers” (Pew’s term) who use the internet or email at work. In fact, 27% of employed adults report that they use the internet “constantly” at work, with the heaviest internet users being government, educational, and non-profit workers, as well as professionals, managers, and executives.

A more significant finding is the extent to which this dependence on the internet is breaking down the traditional barriers between work and home. 14% of those employed adults also use the internet constantly at home> pew goes on to define a category of “Wired and Ready Workers” – the 96% of employed adults who make use of new communications technologies. Of these workers, 46% say these tools and technologies increase the demands that they work more hours, 49% say it’s harder to get away from work at home, and 22% even say they are expected to read and respond to emails when they are not at work. The inference is clear: the more you can work anywhere, the more your job is likely to demand that you do work from everywhere.

Despite this, people see benefits: 80% say they can do their job better, 73% say they share more with their co-workers, and 58% agree that they have more flexible working hours. Although it’s not explicitly listed by Pew as a benefit, it’s clear that the breakdown of the work/home barrier works both ways: 22% of workers report some online shopping at work, 33% read blogs, and 2% even write extracurricular blogs.

Overall, the Pew survey presents a picture of a nation slowly coming to grips with a wired reality. We’ve watched the clash between the busyness economy and the burst economy for quite a while; Pew’s numbers provide a snapshot of how this is playing out, regardless of how employers (and workers) might like it to end up. It seems clear that unless workers find ways to aggressively limit their work, they’ll be expected to deliver unlimited work – and will use this as as opportunity to stretch the limits of acceptable work behavior.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks