Top 7 Disruptions of the Year

Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it’s only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched. We spent 2009 documenting technology’s disruption of how we live, entertain ourselves and do […]

yelp iphoness app augmented reality

Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years -- at least when you get to the end of it and realize it's only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.

We spent 2009 documenting technology's disruption of how we live, entertain ourselves and do business. Looking back on the year from the comfortable perch of December, here are the seven most disruptive developments of 2009.

Google Stack

It's been a running joke for the last few years that Google knows everything you do online, but 2009 might be the year that Google became a full-scale technology platform -- with technologies that layer on top of one another to create the "Google Stack." From your smartphones through to your enterprise's document-creation software, Google now has you covered, with promises of more to come. That means the list of companies whose revenues Google plans to undermine continues to grow (We're thinking about you, AT&T, Skype and Microsoft.)

2009 saw Google start to land in users' pockets, thanks to the the androids OS showing up on the coolest phoness from three of the four dominant U.S. carriers. In July, Google announced the Google Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system that runs web services like Gmail and Google Calendar with a speed comparable to pesky installable software. Your Chrome browser will need to know how to get Google Apps, so it will use Google DNS (new for '09 too, just like Chrome for Mac).

When your friends want to reach you, they'll call your Google Voice number or they'll add a message to the right Google Wave. Or they'll visit your website hosted on Google Sites, click on the Google AdSense ads, which will fund the dinner you just added to you Google Calendar and will write about on your Google Blogger blog. And almost all of that is free so you won't need Google Checkout to pay for their services. And if there's a service missing from that stack (say photo sharing via Picasa), you can always use a search engine called Google to find it.

mobiles App Stores

Before Apple disrupted the mobiles-phones market by granting thousands of software developers access to the iphoness through the App Store, cell carriers used to allow only a handful of companies to make stuff for their phoness. Consumers and developers put up with it because we had no choice, but the App Store changed that.

Apple still exerts some control over which apps are sold in its store, but had approved over 100,000 apps as of November -- an astonishing number no matter how you slice it. Google's androids app store now includes over 20,000 apps, and the concept is spreading to other platforms. Carriers now view third-party-designed apps as a way to augment their offerings and sell bigger data plans, rather than viewing them as an unconscionable loss of control. The app store phenomenon made the cellphones more like the personal computer, and we're all the better for it.

But as disruptive as the app stores are, they may not exist in five years, thanks to the next item on our list.

HTML5

Web protocols aren't as sexy as the iphoness, but they could soon replace the app store as mobiles web browsers improve to run Javascript and HTML5, allowing developers to create what they make as apps today as mobiles web pages tomorrow. Rather than developing a different app for every type of phones, they'll be able to write the code once and have it run everywhere.

Apps are everywhere right now -- whatever you're looking for, there's an app for that, as the commercial says. But as the president of Mozilla's mobiles division said, "Over time, the web will win, because it always does." Gmail's mobiles website already leans hard on HTML5 and is nearly as snappy as a native app. Still doubt that HTML5 can make Apple's apps obsolete? The same thing happened with applications that run on computers (see Google Stack), much to Microsoft's chagrin.

A New FCC

The FCC, under the leadership of Obama's law school classmate Julius Genachowski, is taking its job as the guardian of the nation's airwaves seriously again. The agency is talking about the politically controversial step of taking back spectrum from over-the-air TV broadcasters and making it available for wireless users.

Then this summer, the agency stuck their noses into Apple's app store to see why the Google Voice application was rejected -- forcing AT&T to declare it would let VoIP applications on all their phoness. They are setting formal 'net neutrality' rules and in the face of strong opposition from the wireless industry, plan to apply them to wireless, satellite, cable and DSL providers alike. It's trying to break the cable company's monopoly on set-top boxes, so you can buy one that actually does cool stuff.

And all the while, it's been hard at work composing the country's first-ever national broadband plan, which is due in February (though all signals are the plan will be pragmatic, rather than revolutionary). That's a far cry from the Bush era, where the agency took two years and a public roadshow before it ordered Comcast to stop blocking peer-to-peer file sharing.

journeyStreaming Music

This was the year streaming really took off, and Pandora and YouTube were the big winners in the music space -- YouTube's video service allows it to stream on-demand music that music-only services can't afford.

Google's searches now link directly to on-demand music streaming services (see screenshot), which puts the phenomenon squarely in the mainstream. And more of us are listening to cloud-based music than ever before, through websites, MP3 blogs, MP3 blog aggregators, streaming software and mobiles apps.

We're finishing the year with less diversity in the music space than we started with; Apple acquired Lala, and MySpace bought iLike and imeem. But these acquisitions are a sign that the big players recognize that the future belongs not to iTunes and ipodss, but to web-based services and connected devices.

The Real-Time Web

Twitter is mostly just a protocol for publishing short little messages to the web, but in 2009, the little startup continued its shakeup of the net's landscape, and is on track to become what its leaked internal documents show it hopes to be: the "pulse of the planet." It's not quite that yet, despite becoming a player in the battle over Iran's future. But it has launched the notion of a real-time web, where netizens are constantly and instantaneously updated -- even if it's just about the funny billboard your friend just walked by.

Add to that locations services like foursquare and loopt -- which report where you are -- and the unproven concept of reporting to everyone what you bought via Blippy.com, and you've come up with a recipe for a net that values headlines over nut graphs, narcissism over thoughtfulness, and speed over deliberation.

But the notion was powerful enough to send Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all racing to add Twitter and Facebook posts to their search results, regardless of the utility. And Facebook got envious, re-doing its entire approach to social networking by pushing all of its users to post publicly in an attempt to become the net's vanity press. The upshot of it all: Add "get a prescription to Provigil" to your list of New Year's resolutions if you hope to keep up.

Augmented Reality

This year the world got its first real taste of mobiles augmented-reality apps, which overlay digital information on top of analog reality. The idea is to let you see restaurant ratings floating over restaurants, peoples' tweets appear over their heads, what song they're listening to and so on.

Augmented reality is still a work-in-progress as developers iron out kinks such as the floating tag problem, and as consumers get used to the idea. But in a sense, it's already here -- from geotagged photos to phoness with compasses and maps in them, the internet already intersects with the world at specific locationss, letting us access data where it's most relevant.

What did we miss?

Photo: Yelp's augmented-reality iphoness app shows you a restaurant's rating simply by pointing a phones's camera in the right direction.

Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com

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