BUSINESS
Year in Review '09: Top tech trends (PT II)
30-12-2009
by Sylvia Leatham
In part two we continue our look back at the year's hottest topics.
Everybody's talking at me
Social networking seemed to take over our lives in 2009, thanks to the phenomenal success of two main players, Facebook and Twitter. After a few years battling with social rivals, in 2009 Facebook definitively drew ahead of the pack. Celebrating its fifth birthday in February, Mark Zuckerberg's company announced that it had reached 150 million registered users; by September that number had doubled to a mammoth 300 million users. Interestingly, the fastest-growing age group on Facebook is people in their thirties.
'With great power comes great responsibility' was the tagline for the Spider-Man movie, and with a Facebook film due to reach screens in October 2010, we'd like to suggest the tagline 'with great popularity comes great disgruntlement'. In '09 Facebook managed to upset its users with a site revamp (Facebook's second within a year), numerous phishing scams and malware attacks, alleged unauthorised charges to gamers' credit cards, and a backlash over privacy issues when the site changed its user settings.
Faced with its rival's record user numbers, MySpace finally gave up trying to compete, in spite of its own not-insignificant 130 million or so users. After an April management reshuffle that saw former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta become CEO of the music-heavy social network, MySpace announced in October that it was shifting focus to concentrate on becoming an online hub for music and entertainment. "Facebook is not our competition," Van Natta told the Financial Times.
Meanwhile, it seemed like the whole world fell in love with 140-character status updates this year. Although attracting fewer users than other social sites (around 45 million), micro-blogging service Twitter really came into its own this year, worming its way into the cultural consciousness on the back of celebrity endorsement, user-generated breaking news, and the presence of most major media outlets. Indeed, halfway through the year Twitter underwent a slight change in direction, moving away from its roots as a networking site and focusing instead on becoming a kind of zeitgeist barometer, showcasing which topics people around the world care about through its real-time search engine.
We saw the dark side of Twitter during the year too, chiefly in the form of malware and denial-of-service attacks, but also through the proliferation of fake news. After the real deaths of celebrities Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, some users took advantage of Twitter to spread false gossip far and wide. Jeff Goldblum, Kanye West, P. Diddy, Britney Spears and Harrison Ford were among those whose rumoured deaths were, to quote Wilde, greatly exaggerated. In 2009 these false rumours were merely an annoyance, but with Twitter now partnering with search engines Google and Bing, expect fake -- and malicious -- links to become a serious problem for internet users next year. And given the growing prevalence of URL shorteners, will we be able to click with confidence in 2010?
(See our 'Headline hitters' articles elsewhere on the site for more on Facebook and Twitter.)
The great online content debate
One issue that gathered serious momentum in 2009 was online content, and whether it should, could or would ever be paid for by users. News organisations and other content-generators had quietly been dealing with this issue for years, accepting a trade-off in the form of advertising revenue, but in '09 the global economic recession and subsequent slump in ad sales made everyone wake up and take stock of their assets -- and some questioned whether it was time to stop giving the farm away for free.
The issue grew to a head in May when one of the most prominent media players, Rupert Murdoch, said his News Corp organisation could start charging for online access to publications such as the Times and Sunday Times within a year. Murdoch said that if the move proved successful, all media would follow suit, and indeed by year's end a number of publishers had taken steps in that direction, including the Times itself, Johnston Press, the Economist, and German publishing giant Axel Springer. Several others made plans to charge for mobile versions of their content. An October survey by the UK's Association of Online Publishers showed that nearly 70 percent of publishers intended to charge for online content within a year. The results of a December US newspaper industry study make it easy to understand publishers' frustration: it showed that the average American newspaper story was being copied 4.4 times in full or in part by unauthorised websites.
In the firing line of some of this frustration was none other than internet giant Google. In November Murdoch hinted that News Corp may consider blocking Google from searching its news sites. While that may have been a hollow threat, Murdoch did go as far as holding talks with rival search engine provider Microsoft about possible exclusive access to News Corp content. Responding to mounting criticism from news organisations, Google moved to allow publishers set a daily limit on the number of articles readers can view for free through its search engine. It also made it easier for news organisations to remove their content from Google News while keeping it accessible through Google.com.
The 'free versus paid' debate escalated into a spectacular war of words in November between Arianna Huffington of the HuffingtonPost.com and Mathias Dopfner of Axel Springer. Meanwhile, the Sun reminded us all why we fell in with love newspapers in the first place, in a cheeky ad positioning itself as the 'UK's best handheld'.
E-books: the story so far
Digital books have been with us for a while, but this year they came to our attention again for two reasons: the e-reader market got seriously competitive, and Google caused great upset with its digital books plans. It was "a watershed year for e-readers", according to Sony CEO Howard Stringer, and by October analyst houses were predicting that 3 million electronic readers would be sold this year in the US alone, with that figure set to double in 2010. The e-book marketplace got mighty crowded this year, with no fewer than four e-reader devices from major players jockeying for position. Sony signed up new content partners for its Reader device, Amazon launched the Kindle 2 in multiple territories, Google adapted its Book Search app for the iPhone, and US book giant Barnes & Noble became a serious pretender to the e-book throne with the Nook. What's more, Apple is rumoured to be prepping an e-reader/web browsing tablet device for next year, and Google is gearing up to launch Google Editions, an online store that will deliver e-books to any device with a web browser.
While Google has never been short of attention, this year it suffered a stormy reaction to its digital books settlement, which would allow it to reproduce out-of-print books in a digital format. In the US, the Open Book Alliance, which includes Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, filed objections to the deal, while in Europe, France and Germany formally opposed the settlement. European publishers, booksellers and authors protested at a European Commission hearing on the matter, with campaigners raising copyright, data privacy and censorship concerns. In mid-December, a Paris court convicted Google of copyright infringement over the online publication of books controlled by French publisher La Martiniere, while in China novelist Mian Mian brought a copyright case against Google for scanning her works. Expect to hear more about the Google books deal in 2010 as the battle for digital content -- and the format it comes in -- intensifies.
There's an app for that
The past year saw the explosion of many new trends, not least of which was mobile phone applications. Spawned by the incredible success of Apple's iPhone, the mobile app market saw incredible growth in 2009. Apple's App Store is by far and away the market leader, with over 100,000 apps available for download. In all, users have downloaded over 2 billion apps from the App Store, which celebrated its first birthday in July.
You may be forgiven for thinking that the App Store is the only such store around, but not so. In fact there are a growing number: Google's Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store (read more about Nokia's Ovi Store in our Headline Hitters article), RIM's BlackBerry App World, the Palm Software Store, the LG Applications Store, and Vodafone's soon-to-launch 'web widget application shop'. It must be said though that these efforts fade into the background when compared with the App Store's broad choice of apps, and of course the huge popularity of the iPhone.
In saying that, Apple's App Store has not been without criticism. During the year much was said about Apple's restrictive approval process; it was slated for banning apps that made farting noises, for example. Ironically, once Apple slightly relaxed its restrictions, an application called 'Baby Shaker' slipped through the net. The 'game', which encouraged users to quiet a baby by shaking it, was on sale in the App Store for two days before being pulled due to widespread condemnation.
In general, mobile apps range from the sublime, such as Skype, to the ridiculous, e.g. iFart. It took some time for the Skype app to appear in the App Store, with Apple initially refusing to allow it, saying the app repeated key iPhone functions. The popularity of mobile apps has created a whole new market for enterprising software developers such as Tapulous, the firm behind the immensely popular Tap Tap Revenge. According to a recent profile by Reuters the company rakes in about USD1 million in revenue per month. Closer to home, 20-year-old Dublin student Steven Troughton-Smith is considered one of Ireland's most successful software developers for the iPhone, generating revenues of up to USD1,000 a day with such apps as the Lights Off puzzle game.
The year ahead is widely expected to be the tipping point for the mobile applications market, with many industry analysts suggesting it could be the next big tech revolution.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 