2009 will be a year which goes down in history for one thing - Twitter!  If you aren't Tweeting yet, there's a good chance you will be fairly soon.  The phenomenon has spread like wildfire since the Spring and most web active businesses now embrace this media. There's even been talk of some businesses using Twitter for staff to communicate real time (as you can receive and send Tweets using a mobile phone) as well as men and women using the 140 characters to send coded text to their illicit mistresses or lovers!

What's so great about Twitter? For one thing it's currently free. It's easy to use and it allows you access to people you'd possibly otherwise be unlikely to ever meet or speak with. Of course, like all things 'web', the spammers have kept up the pace and it's a daily battle with Twitter and the idiots peddling their 'Get Rich Quick' or other dubious offerings.

Apart from Twitter, the other big things to have hit the industry include Mobile applications ('apps') thanks mainly, to the iPhone. 'App's have revolutionized the mobile phone to the point where the telephony is secondary to the other functions of the phone. However, even the big banks like Barclays and Natwest have jumped on the bandwagon and now offer apps for their clients to keep check of their bank accounts on the move.

Of course, we can't mention 2009 without mentioning Google. Lot's of things going on here. Their arch rivals at Microsoft ganged up with their relative allies - Yahoo!  This basically coincided with the launch of 'Bing' the search engine designed to rival Google and by offering more than just bog standard Search results. We're not great fans of Bing here but statistics are showing it to be gaining some ground on Google. Google also announced some of their future plans regarding Search. It appears, that from 2010 Google will be valuing speed of websites and that Google want the web to be 'super fast'. Worth thinking about now if you have a clunky site.

At the time of writing we've also just submitted our VAT return online and at long last, even HMRC have updated their website (secure section) to not only be more attractive, but seemingly faster, and certainly easier to use.

So what will 2010 hold? Search will undergo a massive change. Google's infamous 'Real Time Results' feeds from Facebook and Twitter will open a can of worms regarding spammers and Reputation Management.  We also suspect that their be a widening of mobile working and Hogtronix will be meeting demand by producing our own mobile sites for clients. Twitter will also come up with a pricing model for businesses, with such a model allowing multiple users from the same organisation to tweet under the same corporate banner.

Finally, and according to Hitwise, 'Cyber Monday' (December 7) and Sunday December 6 were the joint busiest days for online retailers in 2009. The pre-Christmas peak in visits to online retailers has moved one week closer to Christmas this year compared to 2008, when the busiest day for online retailers was Sunday November 30. This possibly suggests that users could be becoming more shop-savvy in realising that online fulfillment is quicker (sometimes) than other traditional purchasing trends. Of course, it could also be because we were so skint in 2009 because of the recession.

Hogblog would like to wish each and every one of our readers a very Happy New Year - we'll see you on the other side!