ReadWriteWeb's 5 Key Trends of 2010

ReadWriteWeb has posted their "Half-Year Report for The Web". The five key trends?

• Augmented Reality
• Internet of Things
• Mobile
• Real-Time Web
• Structured Data

If you haven't followed these trends, each one is pretty cool by itself. But the brain-bursting part of it all is what you get when you combine all five of them. Seriously, think about it. Your head will explode.

I'm not sure whether we should be terrified of the possibilities, or excited, or both. Makes me think of a recent XKCD comic that has become something of a personal anthem lately: http://www.xkcd.com/728/. (Be sure to hover your mouse over the image, too, and read the alt-text.)

Maybe it's just my biased perspective (partially due, no doubt, to spending months on the problem as part of building TelemetryWeb.com), but the issue of structured data is simultaneously the least glamorous and also the biggest enabler to unlimited possibilities. Point solutions are possible in all the other categories. You don't necessarily need a particularly complex set of standards to make them work. For example, much of the social media genre accomplish amazing things in the real-time web using super-simple data and information architectures. Twitter in particular has done some unbelievable things with nothing but random strings that are only 140 characters long. But in order to truly make use of the data across individual applications in complex "plug-n-play" scenarios, we'll need something more sophisticated than tags.

Discuss amongst yourselves. (or start a conversation below...)