It is fascinating how we throughout our inventions get stuck in almost single minded way of doing things. We seem so sure that we have found the best solutions to things. For example keyboards, which hurt people all over the world, are all flat! There have been invention with rounded keyboards (possibly not very practical), which are much better for your hands, but it didn't catch on. Many examples are of us, the users, sticking to inferior ways of doing things. Why? Because we like what we know, and to change it takes something spectacular!

I predict that 2010-11 will see surge of tools on the Internet that combine several services into one simple to use interface. The fact is that we must all be getting tired of having countless services such as Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, MySpace (anyone still using that?), Gmail, LinkedIn etc. Even with our massive brains and capacity for multitasking, keeping all these services up to date is a daunting task, left only for the most devoted Internet surfers.

Interestingly there are few websites dedicated to help us learn new skills as the Internet is mostly populated by articles and wikis rather than tools that utilize the web to teach us. With all the studies out there on how we best adopt new knowledge, specialized websites could greatly increase our ability to learn from the comfort of our homes.

We have recently seen amazing increase in ways to share our opinions and commentary to the world. With Twitter and Facebook at the forefront we end up posting about most things we do and see, comment on what our friends are saying and distributing what we find on the Internet. There are however more ways to burden the world with our wisdom than the traditional ways of writing.

Haven't we all at one time or another planned a party or some sort of an event paid for by many? It often lands on one person to plan the whole thing, and in the end it becomes difficult to monitor who has paid for what.

It is almost sad how the digital age of photography has turned mass production of wonderful photos into side notes on web pages. Though wonderful that almost everyone can now photograph their experiences, the value of a good photograph has somewhat dwindled as we flickr or Facebook through hundreds of photos.

In our information-overloaded-internet-lives it is not surprising that new ways of portraying data are seeing the light of day. We have seen new types of videos like the ones from Epipheostudios and new forms of graphs and chart s decorate newspapers and web posts. Everyone seems to be working on ways to better display information with effort such as Microsoft Live Labs with their Pivot project. One of the better sources for new ways of displaying data would be at Flowing Data.

In the age of the digital photography almost every household has at least one camera and uses every opportunity to snap of photos. Hard drives around the world are packed up with holiday, party and family photos with many of us now having records of all our noteworthy (and often not so noteworthy) activities. We post these around the web, on our blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Webshots, Picasa and other similar sites. Most of these sites have privacy settings while not really being a storage area for our photos, as they are more intended for sharing.

In recent months the internet is turning into a greater melting pot than ever before. Bombarded with continuous news and updates we find ourselves trying to share what is interesting by tweeting or throwing status lines on Facebook. Sharing link is not always the answer though and even if you have options to share more, it will either involve copying text or writing a description. Amplify is here to give us more selective options as to what we are sharing from each site.

Tired of looking over the run of the mill travel sites with their praises of being the ultimate web site for tourists? Well I am, especially after creating the LiveList for travel websites. So here is something totally different to bring back our enthusiasm for new places and new discoveries.