2009’s High Impact Tech Trends — A Completely Subjective View

I woke up this morning thinking about the various technical trends of 2009 that have affected me in a significant way.  Here they are:

1) Force.com. 2009 was the year where I really started digging the Force.com platform.  For those of you who don’t know, Force.com / Salesforce.com is the key technology I work with every day.  Don’t get me wrong — I’ve enjoyed it since I started working with it in 2007.  But in 2009 I was deep in several very cool — and very different — projects.  Each of them relied on brand new functionality and creative uses of existing features, and each one of them had a material impact on the customer.  Very cool.  Cooler: it’s on everyone’s top 10 trends to watch for 2010.

2) Kindle.  I use it every day.  I buy all my “books” on it and have switched many of my magazine subscriptions.  I love the Kindle and would be very sad if I had to live without it.  There was a piece the other day that bookstores are now going to die because of devices like the Kindle.  Although that would make me sad — I have spent a great deal of time and money in my local Border’s — it would make me much sadder to give up having the biggest Border’s I have ever been to in the palm of my hand.  If I had to pick one to keep, it would be the Kindle.

3) GoGo Inflight.  I love using the internet while I fly.  Hopefully this doesn’t get killed by the events of 12/25.  A flight with GoGo feels faster.  A flight with GoGo feels less pointless.  A flight with GoGo feels like I haven’t put my life on hold for a 4 hour ride in a big silver tube. It’s just excellent.

4) Wii Fit.  The Wii Fit didn’t help me one bit.  Nada.  Zippo.  Zilch.  This surprised me a bit.  I was completely optimistic that a more interactive experience would motivate me to work out a bit on it.  And it did not.  The Wii Fit is  now sitting in my basement, unused for months.  Oh well.

5) Facebook, Twitter and The Blog.  At the end of 2008, I killed my Twitter account and put my blog on hold.  This was a good thing.  I was a little too engaged.  But I brought them both back in February or so and they have both been quite a bit more manageable since taking that much needed time off.  I like social media again.  I like it when I don’t get completely sucked in all day every day.  And having Facebook — a fairly private Facebook — let’s me post to separate audiences when I feel the need.  Not to mention a reconnect with a bunch of people I haven’t spoken with in a long, long time.  Even if it was just one connection — that was very much fun.

6) iPhone Apps.  I was not an early adopter for the iPhone (and even when I tried to get one I suffered through iDenial) and I pretty much hate AT&T.  But the Apps (especially those produced by these guys) have sucked me in.  I’m stuck and I know it.  Drat.

7) Amazon Web Services.  Where does EC2 fit in to all this?  Well, that’s a tough one.  I have an application running on EC2 and I dig it but it’s not substantially different for this app from any server I might get anywhere.  EC2 definitely has a cool place and it’s definitely useful — but I haven’t had that super ah ha moment with it yet.  It’s hardware.  It’s hosting.  And hardware and hosting, even really cool hardware and hosting and even back in the bad old days when I sold monthly hosting aren’t that interesting to me personally.

So that’s it.  I’m sure there are more I should include.  I’ll update the post when I think of them.