Alan Rusbridger, Guardian Editor, has written a column about the 10 most influential technologies in the last decade. I agree with some (Google, Wikipedia) but not others (Spotify, iPlayer) so I thought I would do my own:

Blogger. Out of loyalty to my chosen platform I should say WordPress but I have chosen Blogger. Evan Williams got there first, he had the flexibility of mind to ditch a failing startup to focus on what was getting traction. Unfortunately the bust came along but Williams soldiered through and sold to Google just before the float. Blogger made blogging easy and took it mainstream, it gave a huge number of people the chance to try their hand at writing without the usual gatekeepers. The emergence of blogs has been revolutionary and Blogger played a huge part in that.

Delicious. The great lost opportunity but no less important for that. Delicious showed a completely different way of indexing the web and had the potential to be as big as Google. I have said many times before the sheer beauty of Delicious is that it knows what links I am interested in and who else saved the same links. It is a nascent form of indexing built not on links between pages but links between people. Google is the index built by the web’s authors and Delicious had the potential to be the index built by the web’s users. In fact it was bought by Yahoo who showed a tremendous lack of vision for the company, Joshua Schachter left for Google and it now looks like it could be sold off. Lucky the person who has a bit of insight and picks it up on the cheap. It is still potentially revolutionary after all these years.

Napster. Not the pale music sub service which now bears the name but the original peer to peer network built by Shawn Fanning. Brought a giant industry to its knees and showed the future of media distribution. P2p is not so popular these days but the elegance of the technology and the lack of infrastructure investment mean that it will be relevant for years to come. All it needs is the right business model and someone with the vision to exploit the technology properly.

iPod. Again not the iPhone or the iPod touch, but the original 5gb music player. After Napster came along all people needed was an easy to use, elegant device which could store and play MP3s easily. The iPod wasn’t the first but Steve Jobs spotted a gap where other players were terrible devices and had the vision and boldness to drive his entire company through it.

Freindster. The cautionary tale for Facebook. First mover in social networking but just showed that having users locked up is no defence against new intruders, poor management lost its pre-eminent position but Friendster showed the way early in the decade.

phpBB forums. A true invention of the decade having first been released by James Atkinson on June 17, 2000. In my view this is the most compelling social software out there and I believe this concept will be at the heart of the next generation of social networks. The problem with them at present is that there is no common space. Human beings love to meet and talk on common ground, from the caveman’s camp fire to the local pub. The company to recreate this atmosphere on the web will be huge.

Gizmodo reports that Microsoft is working on a super secret new project called the Courier. It is a device comprised of two folding screens, about the size of a book. It looks very cool and people are excited. As this is not a working device yet there are some sceptics who wonder whether it will ever come into existence

The basic idea, a book like device with two folding screens, is a good one. For all the speculation about an Apple tablet being a giant iPod Touch I have serious doubts whether that is what is planned. That would make it something akin to a CrunchPad and I don’t think a tablet like device works at that size. The stated purpose of the CrunchPad is to surf while you are on the couch, but that would be pretty awkward with a large, flat device. A book type orientation with two screens works far better because it mimics an action people are already familiar with. It also has the advantage that you can turn it sideways and use it like a conventional laptop with one of the screens converted to a virtual keyboard, iPhone style.

The success of the Kindle has also shown that there is a nascent market for eBooks. Again I think we are in the book equivalent of the pre-iPod days when there were clunky HD based music players which made it possible to see the future direction but the breakthrough device has not yet come. The Kindle has the same problem as the CrunchPad in that it is a flat, rigid device which is too great a leap from the traditional book reading experience to catch on. I’m going to boldly state now that Apple has no intention of producing a tablet like device and will come out with something far more similar to the Courier. If that happens we will see the stage set for a battle royal between Apple and MS. It will be the first time they have squared off in the same market without one or the other having built up a huge lead.

The advent of these devices has great potential to change the way people access information via the Internet. While you get broadly the same news on the internet it is not as satisfying as reading a newspaper. The design is far worse online, the pages seem cramped and hedged in with ads. This is partly to the size and orientation of computer screens which do not approximate well to the dimensions of a book or newspaper which leads to a lot of redundant space and bad design. Now, with the advent of devices which are further away from a traditional computer and closer to a book or a newspaper there is the opportunity for eBooks and genuine digital newspapers to really take off. It’s as big a shift as the emergence of the iPod was for music, the only difference is that in this case the breakthrough device may come from, whisper it, Microsoft.

A lot of people have been burnt predicting a big future for mobile applications. The last one to really break out was SMS in the mid-nineties. Since then there have been various stabs at other useful applications but none of them have really stuck. I remember using an early version of mobile internet access in about 2000 and it was terrible. Since then I have stuck to very simple mobiles which do calls and text without having to be recharged every five minutes.

The problem is that the breakthrough of mobile is much trumpeted but has never really delivered. Now, along came the iPhone and forced everyone to raise their game and now we are just beginning to see the start of what is possible. But where we are really seeing useful mobile applications is in the developing world. Mobiles are everything there, because there is no alternative. No landlines and, for most people, no personal web access.

The applications they create have to be simple because the devices have not got the power to support anything more. Despite this restriction mobile banking has taken off in the developing world far better than in the West. Again, this is partly due to people not having access to traditional banking which has meant skipping an intermediate stage of development just as had happened with telephony.

One current hindrance to better mobile applications in the developed world is poor battery life but once that is solved, iPhone levels of usefulness will become more widespread. At the moment smartphones are still a niche pursuit with most people using their phones primarily for voice and text. People do use their phones for photos and music but both are just ported from other devices rather than a new communications technology as SMS was. This is not to say that these functions don’t have potential to do more, just that nothing has yet.

The primary advantage of smartphones is location awareness. The types of services which take advantage of this are still restricted to enthusiasts. A friend of mine added Google Latitude when it came out and found nobody else he knew used it. It will need smartphones to become as ubiquitous as phones before we see things take off but the increasing power and decreasing cost of new devices means that the future of mobile applications is around the corner after a few false dawns.