Trendsspotting has composed an interesting report on how social media will evolve in 2010 according to some of the leading industry voices.

In my opinion, 2010 will be the year that social media will break free from the traditional social networking platforms by becoming portable and scalable. Foursquare and Gowalla are first steps in the direction of location-based social networks and thanks to a social gaming element added to these apps, they are allready quite popular by the digital early adopters.

As Facebook is the new standard, I'm curious to see on how Facebook Connect will evolve as your digital ID card online and how it will make your online identity blend into the real world thanks to the rising popularity of smartphones. And what about social commerce? What if Amazon, eBay or iTunes would implement Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect or Twitter? Buying and selling socially would drastically change e-commerce. Imagine group buys together with your Facebook Friends or recieving a discount if you share your purchase on Twitter?

I'm also waiting to see how TV will become more social. Realtime chatting from your couch on your TV screen when X-factor is on with your friends. This could look a bit like what SplashCast was doing!

Anyways, just have a look at this slideshare presentation and save some money hiring a "social media expert" to tell you the same thing.

I have noticed something very strange lately. It started when I saw the TV-ads for Yahoo, I thought it was insane to air ads for a website. A bit later I saw a chart somewhere on the interwebs that showed a steep decline in traffic for Yahoo. I wondered how Yahoo's main competitor MSN was doing, so I started researching a bit with the help of my dear friend Google Trends.

After a while I noticed almost a pattern in the traffic decline of major global websites, all starting around September 2008. Portals, news websites, video sites, shopping sites and even adult & dowload sites are all hit. Check out the graphs in my presentation!

I'm looking forward to hear your conspiracy theories, thoughts and possible explanations. Adrian Hoole & Jamie Chadwick are convinced about the correlation with the recession, Nick Meyers on the other hand believes it's: "The end of the destination web and the rise of the social web" and I'm betting on that horse too! But what do you think?