A study has revealed that shopping via your mobile phone is so frustrating that many consumers give up trying.

The e-Spirit survey showed that while the number of shoppers using e-commerce sites on their mobiles will double this year, these consumers still make up a minority (14%) of overall on-line shoppers.

The study of 400 people found that every single respondent was frustrated with mobile shopping. Their complaints included worries about security, annoyance at the slowness of the e-commerce sites and difficulties with use.

So it seems that while there has been an explosion in mobile use over the last few years – and with this the promise of easier on-line access anywhere, anytime – the frustrations of actually using a mobile phone as a shopping platform is putting consumers off.

In turn, this means that e-retailers are potentially missing out on many sales via mobiles as consumers are put off using e-commerce sites on what should be an extremely handy gadget.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

And, of course, YouTuber is keen to compile its own “top” list for 2009. It comes as no surprise to find that the most watched YouTube video of 2009 was Susan Boyle’s audition video from Britain’s Got talent.

The Year End Top Video Report for 2009 also revealed that Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me” topped the music video category.  Here are the top five results:

Most Watched YouTube videos globally:

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (over 120 million views)
2. David After Dentist (over 37m views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (over 33m views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (over 31m views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (over 27m views)

Most watched music videos on YouTube globally:

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (over 82m views)
2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (over 64m views)
3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (over 54m views)
4. The Lonely Island “I’m On a Boat” (over 48m views)
5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (over 35m views)

Twitter has compiled a list of top “Trending Topics” for 2009. These are the topics and issues that have captured global attention – and have created the most twitterings.

Among all the keywords, hashtags and phrases that proliferated on Twitter, it was the term #iranelection that came out top, making it one of the most engaging topics of the year.

Here are the top three Twitter topics in various categories:

News:
1    #iranelection
2 Swine Flu
3 Gaza

People:
1 Michael Jackson
2 Susan Boyle
3 Adam Lambert

Films:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck

Hash tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw

So if you want to stay in touch with what everyone else is talking and thinking about it might be a good idea to keep up with Twitter. Well, you knew that anyway, didn’t you?

David Gray Q & A… Charley Carta

I would like to wish you all a happy new year and I hope that you are sticking to your new years resolutions!

As promised I am back this year interrogating more members of the team so that you all know what floats our boats!

This week I questioned another of the newest members of the WebCreation UK team, Charley Carta, who works in our project support team.

Q: What is involved in working in project support?

It’s a tough job, but also a rewarding one. We’re mainly here to help our clients with any problems they might have, whether that’s just needing some info about something, or a larger scale problem, we’ll always try our best to help.

Q: Have you ever googled yourself?

Yeah, it’s mainly just my facebook and myspace pages, nothing particularly interesting to be honest! I am mentioned on this girl’s youtube page, as if we’re best friends, and I have no idea who she is! Scares me a little.

Q: Name your 3 favourite website designs by WebCreation UK?

Oh no, I hope our clients don’t read this! My three favourites are probably Andy Abraham’s website (www.andyabraham.com), Queensbury Media (www.queensburymedia.co.uk) and Reflection Chauffeurs (www.reflectionchauffeurs.com), these sites are excellent as they each have an original design which compliments the content of the site well.

Q: What did you get for Christmas?

Some clothes and books, it was an excellent Christmas!

Q: What was the last thing you bought online?

Well, I literally just bought the Brian Butterfield soundboard for my iPod, if you don’t know who he is, you should! If that doesn’t count, a pair of drumsticks off of eBay.

Q: What three websites do you use the most?

Facebook, Facebook and Facebook. Just joking, it’s most likely Facebook, Youtube and Kloth for nameserver look-ups.

Q: Finally, what do you spend your time doing outside of work?

In the weekdays I just watch a film or play Call of Duty with work mates, then on weekends I like to go out and get messy, then Sunday is band practice!
Check us out – www.myspace.com/wishiwasaroundabout

Have a good weekend and I’ll be back next week!!

A new Twitter feature called Contributors, which is aimed specifically at businesses, is currently undergoing beta testing. The idea behind Contributors is to allow companies to have more control over who is posting for their Twitter account – and to make this info more visible to users.

How this works is that the contributor’s username is added to the tweet byline. So if @buzz invites @bizz to tweet on its behalf then a tweet from @buzz would include @bizz in the byline. This means that users will know exactly who has been tweeting.

Of course, you can always use some of your tweet character allowance to add your own byline but word count can be precious when you’re tweeting.

And once the Contributor’s feature is rolled out it’s believed that Twitter will be working on a number of other business “gadgets”.

It’s always interesting to hear what the experts have to say about the future of the world wide web. Especially, when it’s about one of the hottest topics at the moment: the future of the search industry.

The latest predictions come from Google’s Matt Cutts no less. According to the search guru, there will be a continued trend for finding new data sources to search. For example, there will be more searches like email searches with Gmail and books with Google Book Search.

Another prediction is that Google will continue to improve search over “harder problems”. Specifically, Cutts said that Google would be determining what is really going on with the words in documents and queries.

Cutts is reported as explaining it as this: “A lot of people think that if you type in ‘A B C’, all Google does is crawl the web and return pages that match ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.” But apparently this is not so. Google does more “sophisticated stuff”.

Cutts said that Google thinks about all kinds of things, including synonyms and morphology and “all sorts of ways where we think, ‘oh, this is really related to them conceptually’.”

He also reckons that we’ll be more at ease with “storing their data in the cloud”. He says more people will move their data from hard drives to cloud services – with the result that it will be easier to search and therefore contribute to the delivery of more relevant results.

Of course, real-time and mobile came up as significant in the future of search, too. It looks like being an exciting year in 2010 for search. Keep reading this blog for more updates.