Andreessen On Skype: “This Is One Of The Most Important Companies On the Internet.”

Since I’ve been at Mashable, my track record with year-end predictions has been pretty good. That’s probably because rather than making wild and sexy pontifications about what will happen in the year ahead (but almost certainly will not), I tend to just look at the trends of the past year and make educated guesses about how those will evolve.

Boring and predictable, perhaps, but also a good way to round up the year past (in our little part of the world) and talk about the year ahead. Below, a look back at 2009’s picks — six of which were pretty spot on — and some educated guesstimates for 2010. Happy New Year!

2009’s Report Card

Facebook and MySpace Become Aggressive Acquirers

Both Facebook and MySpace made a number of significant deals this year. Most notably, Facebook gobbled up FriendFeed, while MySpace pushed further into digital entertainment by acquiring both iLike and iMeem. With $100 million in fresh financing, Twitter also got into the acquisition game, buying up Mixer Labs to bolster its geolocation features. Look for this trend to continue in 2010, with mobile and geolocation startups making attractive targets for the big social sites (along with more traditional acquirers like Google and Microsoft).

The eBay Breakup

As expected, what I called “the Internet’s biggest holding company” began to dismantle. Skype was sold off to private equity firms and StumbleUpon was sold back to its original founding team. Wall Street seems to have responded positively to the refocus on ecommerce and payments, with eBay’s share price more than doubling from its lows of the year.

A Big Year for Amazon

One need look no further than Amazon’s share price to see the kind of year the company had. With its retail business continuing to flourish, its data services business gaining steam, and its Kindle becoming perhaps the hottest gift this holiday season, Amazon had a very big 2009 indeed.

Google Chrome Gains Meaningful Marketshare

One of the most aggressively marketed products in Google history, Chrome has been downloaded more than 40 million times, making it the third most popular web browser. Google finally launched a Mac version earlier this month, and with Chrome OS expected to make its debut on netbooks next year, Chrome is going to continue to be a force in the browser market.

At Least One Big Newspaper Goes All Digital

The implosion of print media continued in 2009, but as expected, newspaper outfits aren’t just hanging up their hats without a fight. The Seattle-Post Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain news both ended their print editions, but continue to publish online editions (the latter at a new website started by former reporters) with a leaner staff and without the overhead of paper and trucks. This trend will only intensify in the next year.

Comments Become the New Blogs

This didn’t evolve quite as I saw it happening, but as the social stream came to prominence in 2009, our actions on third-party sites — like comments on blogs and news websites — became an important part of what’s being fed into our Twitter and Facebook streams.

Startup Incubators Flourish

The cost of launching a web startup continues to decline, and the incubator model continues to flourish. In addition to Y Combinator and TechStars, which continue to be launch pads for dozens of startups, other programs like Launch Box and Next Start are also providing an alternative to traditional funding. Local governments are even getting in on the low-cost startup game, with both New York and San Francisco launching programs to foster tech innovation.

Twitter Doesn’t Go Mainstream

This was one of my more controversial predictions last year, and although Twitter has grown many times over since then, it could be argued that Twitter is currently stalled just short of mainstream. Sure, everyone and their mother has heard of Twitter at this point, and it certainly has an awareness in the media and with big brands that isn’t going anywhere, but as I suggested, many are simply using the service passively — occasionally checking the tweets of a favorite celebrity, media outlet, or a friend — as opposed to using the service themselves. Twitter is still many orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and MySpace, despite the latter’s continuing decline.

Predictions for 2010

Facebook Gets into Location and Payments

Location is hot on everyone’s 2010 prediction lists, and for good reason. Most new smartphones includes GPS, Twitter is integrating location (and making deals to bolster its capabilities), and startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are gaining traction. But the company that can and most likely will bring location mainstream is Facebook.

With your whole social graph already neatly organized on Facebook (close friends, strangers, people I friend because I have to) and the social network’s mobile apps already downloaded tens of millions of times across platforms, the company is in prime position to launch location features and dominate the space.

And while Location could be the feature that gives Facebook the staying power that previously dominant social networks lacked, it could be payments that make the company a financial powerhouse. Leveraging Facebook Connect, it’s conceivable that Facebook will launch a PayPal competitor, providing e-commerce sites with not just an easy way to accept payments, but also rich data about who their customers are based on their profiles and connections.

iPhone Launches on a New Carrier in the US

Along with Kanye West and Tiger Woods, AT&T sits near the top of the list for most-used punch lines of 2009 (I even managed to combine them this morning). Rest assured, Apple isn’t ignorant to the service issues its customers have been facing, and perhaps more convincingly, is fully aware they’re making more money in parts of the world where they don’t have iPhone exclusively on one carrier. Combine all that with the need to keep growing market share in light of increasingly worthy competitors and it’s very likely we’ll see iPhone on a new carrier in 2010 — most likely Verizon, but perhaps T-Mobile.

BlackBerry Loses Market Share

As someone who has used BlackBerry his entire working life (recently making me the butt of jokes among colleagues), it saddens me to say that I think 2010 is the year that the device finally loses some ground. When you consider the plethora of Android devices hitting the market and the potential of iPhone launching on a new carrier, someone has to be the loser, and that will likely be BlackBerry, whose interface and app selection sorely trails that of its competitors. Recent service outages also aren’t helping the cause.

Live Video Goes Mainstream and Becomes Immensely Profitable

We’ve recently highlighted some of the huge numbers that live web video broadcasts are generating. Much of that has to do with live video evolving from people turning on a webcam in their bedroom to professionally produced programming with celebrity talent, as highlighted by the recent Ashton Kutcher Katalyst HQ broadcast. In 2010, I expect this narrative to move from “wow, huge numbers” to “wow, it’s a real business” as top live video broadcasters are able to turn their programming into mini-media outfits with the help of sponsors.

Sell Outs: Twitter, Ustream, Foursquare or Gowalla

OK, so I lied, here are a few random guesses at some deals that might happen in 2010 (and why):

Twitter’s acknowledged that it has a growth problem. And while a business model appears to be coming together, selling out might start to look increasingly attractive if the company can’t reignite growth.

In line with my thinking that live video is going to go big in 2010, the web’s giants are going to want to get in on it. And Ustream, with its mature platform, celeb users and evolving business model, is the logical choice.

Facebook might build its own location features — or it might just buy them. In addition to getting both technology and teams by acquiring someone like Foursquare or Gowalla, Facebook would also get a potentially huge new business model to roll out to its existing base of advertising clients: location-based mobile ads.

More Paywalls … Some of Them Successful

One of the more compelling (if not overdramatized) media stories of the past year has been Rupert Murdoch’s plan to put up paywalls on News Corp. websites. Murdoch’s not alone in his vision of how to make more money online. Variety recently put up paywalls of its own, and along with easier ways to pay (Facebook, perhaps?), more media companies will try it in 2010. And I have a hunch that some of them (of the WSJ and Variety ilk) will be successful, at least in terms of making more profit, albeit from a smaller audience.

What do you think of my 2010 picks? Have your own ideas for the year ahead? Let us know in the comments!

[img credit (header): greeblie]

Reviews: Android, Chrome, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Gowalla, Ilike, MySpace, Skype, Twitter, iPhone, imeem

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