The start of a new year is a time to think about the past, but also an opportunity to look to the future.  Such endeavors are never certain, but here are five of my predictions for the coming year.

Smart Phone Bandwidth will become more expensive.

As more and more consumers switch to smart phones, their carriers will run out of signal carrying capacity.  In order to pay for additional infrastructure and research, these companies will monetize bandwidth access.  While some consumers will still be able to pay for full speed connectivity, most will have to accept inferior connectivity.

With less bandwidth available, sites will take longer to load.  Site efficiency will become even more important to those hoping to reach the mobile market.  More complex sites may turn to a torrent like approach, where a pared down site is available immediately, while a more complex version gradually loads while the smart phone is not in use.

HTML 5.0 will become the de facto language for cutting edge site development.

While the final draft of HTML 5.0 is not scheduled until 2012, large sections of the standards have become stable.  The newest versions of Safari, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome already implement large swaths of the HTML 5.0 draft guidelines, and developers looking to get ahead of the curve will switch to the new standards wherever practicable.

This means better video embedding, map applications that will remember where you last left them, and stronger semantic support for specific website elements.  It also means that we may have a period of “overlapping” sites, like when Flash was first becoming popular.

The Semantic Web will make it easier to manage your content everywhere it appears on the Internet.

Increased application of the new standards will make semantic searches and applications more effective.

Within the semantic web, browsers, search engines, and online applications will be able to tell the difference between a menu and an address - a sidebar and central content.

If you have a semantically coded website, online address books, city guides, banner advertisements and the like will update themselves whenever you make a relevant change to your website.

Facebook will continue to grow, but may lose the younger set to more targeted competitors.

Facebook has become a monolith, and in the months to come even more people will flock to it as a way to stay connected.  However, ongoing changes to the privacy policy and increased publicity about private and background investigators using the service to snoop on it’s members will have a chilling effect on the amount of information given.

While Facebook is not likely to disappear any time soon, smaller, more agile social media sites will start to pick off activists, dissidents, and younger students by offering services more targeted to their specific needs.

A Business-to-Business Social Media site will reach the point where it will be mentioned in the same sentence as Facebook or LinkedIn.

There already are a couple Business-to-Business sites looking to connect corporate entities (rather than their employees) using social paradigms.  Alibaba.com in particular seems to have the right sort of ideas.  Businesses can not only post business profiles and what products they have available, but they can also put up “wish lists” for products they’re seeking, and post private notes to each other’s accounts.  Add in other services like corporate status updates, testimonial publishing and accreditation badges, and you really will have a useful resource for researching and connecting businesses.

But that’s not all…

What trends you see continuing into the future?  What great changes can you predict for 2010?