Five Technologies Shaping The Web In 2010

As we’re coming to the end of this year, everyone starts to look towards the next one and there will no doubt be an upsurge of articles predicting the web trends of 2010 in the next days to come.

However, in this article, Six Revisions will be talking about what’s actually driving these trends now, and what they mean for the future of the internet.

1. CSS3, HTML5 And Fonts As A Service
CSS3, HTML5, and Fonts as a Service such as Typekit that cater to web browsers that already support the @font-face rule, are giving web designers the creative freedom that they have been coveting for a long time.

2. Ways We Browse The Web
The browser landscape is alive and well, with better and faster web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Web users today are provided with many choices that will surely drive competition and one-upping from these companies — stressful for their developers, but great for consumers.

3. Social Media
No one can deny that 2009 has been a big year for social media: Twitter, for example, has become the buzzword in many a boardroom and office. It’s obvious that it will continue to a big part of the web in the future.

In many ways, the growth of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has led the web to be much more community-oriented. Big changes could happen within social media and, no doubt, will be led by monetization of the media.

4. JavaScript
Whilst CSS3/HTML5 has started to step on the toes of JavaScript, JavaScript itself has started to inch into the territory of Flash. The growth of frameworks such as jQuery and has made rich client-side interaction and asynchronous/seamless user experiences a reality. This leads to easier deployments of web applications, which in turn, increases competition, which in turn, leads to innovation.

JavaScript is already stepping into what, in the past, we would associate as being Flash’s territory, such as interactive games (which can be used for training and distance-learning applications) and complex and interactive data visualization. It should also enable us to replicate rich interfaces and flash type experiences in a much more accessible way.

5. Software As A Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service business models have been knocking around for years. Top-notch SaaS such as 37 Signals products and Google Enterprise are more commonplace now than ever before.

The competition is fierce; the technologies are becoming affordable and requiring little upfront costs, which gives the little guys a chance to compete with the bigger guys. In the next year, we’ll see this competition increase, and hopefully, the outcome is innovation in web apps.

Photo by ilco.

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