Pinning down the number one theme for 2010 is a bit hard. “Cataloguing” certainly came to the fore; “social” grew up a bit; “semantic”, “Web 3.0″ and “cloud” were mentioned a lot, and “curation” started to hit the radar towards the end. For me none of those were really the defining buzzword for the year though. I think the key term was “trend”. 2010 was all about finding and highlighting trends in search, social networking, and apps. Every major graph provider opened up their APIs for app developers to sift through all their data and find what we were talking about. Some interesting projects came out of it.

Trying to work out what will be the big thing next year is even more difficult, but I’m going to hazard a guess. 2011 will be the year of the “magazine”.

It’s not actually a terribly insightful guess. It’s already started. Magazine style websites and applications are popping up all over the place: it started with the awful Wired iPad app, the interesting Zinio magazine marketplace, and Virgin’s “Project“. The trend will continue with Apple rolling out their new subscription payment service allowing user’s to pay for monthly content downloads for their favourite magazine apps very easily.

It won’t just be iPad and phone apps though. The magazine graphic style will start to permeate through web design. The design and layout ideas that we’re used to seeing when we’re flicking through our favourite periodicals will become recognisable on our favourite websites. Big images, gorgeous typography, elements extended outside of the grid, tons of whitespace, and so on.

Finally, we’ll see more “magazine” services that can take our lifestream (social, news, blogs, etc) and craft it into a beautiful and accessible format. It started this year with the amazing Flipboard, but more services are going to be becoming available in the next 12 months. One to watch in that regard will be TweetMag who’re going to be turning Twitter streams into magazines.