2 Web Trends You're About to Surf

1 Mobile Surfing on the Rise
Email, status updates, news, whatever. Increasingly, if you can browse it on your PC, you can also do it on your cellphone.

With India’s 500 million mobile connections, phone-makers and service providers are competing to make it cheaper and easier to cruise the Web from the their handsets. 3G is on its way, and for us in India, the mobile Web experience gets better with each rapid stride in telecom technology. Mobile phone Web users trumped desktop Internet users in 2008. In 2009 the number doubled. A Rs. 13,900 phone has Wi-Fi, GPRS and also flexes the 3.2 MBps 3G muscle. Of course, all smart Web sites also provide mobile versions, available with the addition of a simple ‘m.’ before the URL. The latest cricket scores? m.cricinfo.com. Stuck in traffic? Download Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech from m.youtube.com. M-Shopping is steadily gaining ground; it won’t be long before an m.amazon.com gets as much trust and use as the regular Web site.

2 Into the Statusphere
Every day, Facebook’s 350 million plus users spend 8 billion minutes on Facebook, and post 45 million status updates. And with 2 billion new photos uploaded every month, users just can’t get enough. These things point to a larger trend. (Also see the Facebook profile )

Some label it an obsession with sharing every little event in our lives on social networks like Orkut, Facebook, or even the professional networking site, LinkedIn. The 140 character micro-blogging trend initiated by Twitter has meant we update either one or all our status messages at one go, almost four to five times a day. Our urge to share our feelings, seek opinions, vent, show off, flirt, fight, live via our status messages, is now pretty much a universal habit with online denizens. The introduction of the BlackBerry has only made it easier. Is this good? Like all else, it depends on your social circle. God help you if your friends all think they’re humorists.