Last year I attempted to describe what I would be doing with this blog. I am not going to do that this year as I prefer a more fluid approach. Planning what I want to write for this blog is hard because it is a commentary on current tech news in many cases. So I have decided to write a traditional predictions post instead for 2010.

• Many tablets are released to much fanfare, and people swoon over Apple‘s offering. Then they realize that any tablet over $400 is a solution looking for a problem, and go back to buying laptops and netbooks. Yes, tablets will fail again, but for different reasons than before. eBook readers have the low end functionality and a fairly reasonable price. Newer phones, like the Droid or iPhone, allow you to browse the web in a manner that doesn’t suck, and there are tons of applications for these new devices. If netbooks are priced in the $300 range and are very portable, that leaves very little room for a tablet. Basically, for the tablets to really succeed, it would need to be priced between 300 and 400, use handwriting recognition, do everything an eBook reader does, still be a multitouch device and have an OS as cool as Android or the iPhone with all of the installable applications both OSes now have.
• Google releases serious geo/local offerings. Latitude will become a true competitor to FourSquare and Gowalla and uses your predefined network of email, blogger and Google Reader contacts. Of course, it becomes immediately useful and makes people wonder what ever happened to FourSquare and Gowalla.
• Facebook gets into the geo/location game by purchasing Foursquare. They could technically buy any of the other players if they were looking for functionality, but Foursquare brings a nice amount of buzz with it.
• Google makes a huge push into ecommerce, buying an ecommerce provider/platform in the process. They also enable smaller stores like Yahoo used to do, but it is based on their Google Sites offering with hooks into their new ecommerce platform. One possible purchase would be Etsy unless they decide to stay independent.
• Yahoo continues to close various unsuccessful properties as they get closer to a content only company. What much of the blogosphere fails to realize is that this is an excellent move for Yahoo. As Yahoo moves closer to a content portal and social integration of their other services, they will have a resurgence of popularity by the end of the year.
• Twitter will buy one of the third party clients, probably Tweetdeck. A desktop client would be a huge boon to the company, and also warn everyone developing against the API that the company wants to own everything and not really enable an ecosystem. Twitter will also create their own URL shortener and make it the default. Twitter will also make some other minor enhancements like making DMs useful instead of spam central as they get closer to waging full scale war with Facebook. Twitter will also do something completely unexpected yet completely obvious. This will leave the blogosphere wondering how we did not think of it.
• Some major technical blog will break an embargo and other major blogs will have a fit. Duh.
• The semantic web will finally start to make progress into the mainstream, but not in the same way we thought. The main drivers will be augmented reality, geo/location apps and hyperlocal information. All of these types of applications have much greater need to pass more relevant information than any other applications that are on the internet now.
• Social media and other Facebook and Twitter applications will go through a major consolidation. There are tons of applications out there, and many have gained significant popularity. However, there are just too many applications and many people will likely try to sell their assets or find some way to get acquired. This should not be a shock to people, but the surprise will come with how many acquisitions actually occur.

I am sure there are tons of things I am missing, especially in the mobile space. What do you think will happen in 2010?

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