Online outsourcing marketplace (and Anthill Cool Company Award winner) Freelancer.com has released the results of its 2010 Freelancer Fast 50 index, an analysis of 320,000 online job postings, revealing the most (and least) popular technologies desired for freelance jobs in 2010, providing a barometer of global technology trends.
The study concludes that PHP is the online skill most in demand on Freelancer.com, with PHP-based projects increasing by 40% last year. The big loser of this study is Microsoft, with Microsoft-related projects, such as Windows Desktop applications, falling 47% when compared to 2009.
The rise of PHP
PHP domination in 2010 provides a strong indication that this programming language is usurping the importance of traditional languages, such Perl, down by 39%, C Programming, down by 31%, and ASP, down by 22%.
Even Ruby was unable to slow the rise of PHP, falling 3%.
Only Javascript experienced an increase in popularity last year, by 42%.
The popularity of PHP is expected to continue to rise in 2011 and, with it, many other PHP based frameworks, such as Zend, Codelgniter and CakePHP.
Mobile growth
Mobile application projects continued to grow in 2010.
Projects involving Objective C applications increased by 647%. Apple’s iPad debuted in 2010 with 2,656 projects and the iPhone saw a growth of 182% with 6,890 related projects.
Android projects rose by 501% and Blackberry rose by 446%.
But the biggest rise was achieved by Nokia, with Nokia-based projects increasing 8,700%.
In 2011, Freelancer.com predicts that Android projects will pass iPhone applications in popularity.
The Social Networks
The Social Networking category in Freelancer.com grew by 75% in 2010.
Leading the applications race was Facebook, up by 364%, followed by Twitter, YouTube and SocialEngine. Even the number of MySpace-related projects increased last year by 59%.
Online retail winners
Projects to sell products and services over the web also increased in popularity in 2010.
Ebay related projects grew by 791%. Magento was the most popular platform among shopping cart projects, experiencing growth of 182%, closely followed by osCommerce and Zen Cart.
