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 If 2010 taught us anything, it's that few people are able to accurately predict even the simplest events in the near-term future, let alone the big ones. From the price of gold, to unemployment, to Google Wave, prognosticators got more than a few major items wrong in their predictions lists.Here, in no particular order, are "10 for 10" -- 10 of the worst predictions of 2010."Unemployment Drops Below 9 Percent," Newsweek "business predictions for 2010," December 2009.Unfortunately, despite increasing efforts to contain our nation's unemployment epidemic, the unemployment rate never dipped below 9.5 percent, and climbed to 9.8 percent in November. Let's hope that a dip in the unemployment rate below 9.5 percent is something we will see in the coming year."The GOP will make good, though not great, gains in the midterms," John Berbyshire, National Review , Dec. 30, 2009Republicans took an incredible 63 seats in the House and came within just a few seats of taking the Senate. But the next part of Derbyshire's prediction -- "They will immediately embark on a strategy guaranteed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" -- may still come to pass."A new social network will rise to join the big ones." Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb , Dec. 24, 2009.Not quite. In fact, 2010 was the year of Facebook. It topped 500 million users, it was the subject of constant IPO speculation, Time named its founder Person of the Year, and it spawned a hugely successful feature film. Meantime, its competitors struggled to stay afloat (looking at you, MySpace and Bebo). In short, no one is even attempting to challenge Facebook for supremacy. Perhaps someday a new player will rise to make the king of all social networks a second-rate choice, but that day doesn't look to be coming any time soon."Twitter, as we know it, will fade away. Either acquired or shut down." CNBC Tech Check Predictions 2010 , Dec. 1, 2009Many predicted the downfall and/or complete demise of Twitter in 2010, and many were completely wrong. Twitter has instead silenced its critics by gaining more than 100 million users, increasing staff from 130 to 350 people and raising more than $200 million in financing, raising its value to $3.7 billion, all during the past 12 months "To believe that Apple can somehow succeed where all others have failed is to ignore some fundamental realities of tablet computing." Randall C. Kennedy, Infoworld.com , Dec. 22, 2009Apple still hasn't lost its golden touch: More than 4 million iPad buyers in a single quarter can attest to that."In 2010 ... netbooks will take off," Julia Boorstin, CNBC , Dec. 1, 2009Between the announcement and introduction of the iPad and its many tablet-based competitors, and the lack of performance and high prices, netbook sales spiraled downward in 2010. Expect a continued free-fall in sales unless prices are slashed drastically, or the iPad ceases to exist."In 2010, Wave's utility will become more apparent," Pete Cashmore, CNN Tech , Dec. 3, 2009Massively over-hyped during its introduction in late 2009, Google Wave was to be the central hub of our lives, merging our e-mail, social networking, instant messaging, wiki and every other form of digital media in one "easy to use" package. "Easy to use" it was not, however. So while some were optimistic that Google Wave's utility would shine through eventually, the rest of us decided to simply ignore its clunky, scatterbrained approach to digital life.Google promptly flushed Wave down the toilet in August, less than a year after its introduction."A serious correction could send the precious metal toward $870," Saxo Bank analysts, cited by CNBC , Dec. 17, 2009.Not even close to coming true. Gold prices have steadily rallied upward in the past year, rising past the $1,400 mark per troy ounce late in the year."By late 2010, paying for products and services via a mobile device such as a cell phone will begin to emerge in the mainstream U.S.," Jonathan Reichental, reichental.com , Jan. 1, 2010.Another prediction that may come to pass someday but that wasn't meant to be in 2010. Simply put, people are not yet ready to give up their credit cards in favor of a "credit phone" to pay for purchases on- or offline."We project that at least half the cast will, of their own volition, opt to stay," Sarah Ball, Newsweek , December 2009While the cast of ABC's monumental hit would probably have liked to stay on the island and continue to collect their handsome paychecks, writers instead opted to kill everyone off in the series' finale.Here's one prediction you can count on coming true: Most 2011 predictions will also be spectacularly wrong, and I'll be watching.J. Conboy is a highly opinionated freelance writer with many specialties. You can find more of his work on AOL News, AOL Travel Luxist and various other AOL sites. ||||| Google says its mission is to organize the world’s information, but that statement should be probably updated to include the verb “sell” now that Google is launching an e-bookstore on Monday. 
 
 Google’s long awaited e-book-only bookstore, Google eBooks, puts the company in competition with Amazon, Apple and Borders for the burgeoning electronic-book market. The move, limited at the start to U.S. customers only, also marks the first real retail venture for the search and online-advertising behemoth, if you don’t count the Android app market. 
 
 “The fundamental idea is buy anywhere and read anywhere,” said James Crawford, an engineer for Google eBooks, who emphasized that the system makes it easy to read the same book on multiple devices. “The fundamental architecture is cloud-based, and you never wonder where to put your books.” 
 
 The company claims that it will have more books in its catalog than any other online bookstore — more than 3 million titles, but only about 200,000 of those are books licensed from publishers. About 2.8 million of the books are books no longer under copyright in the United States that Google has scanned from university libraries as part of its controversial Google Books project. Started in 2004, Google Books has scanned millions of books, mostly without permission from copyright holders, making them searchable online. 
 
 The venture is yet another attempt by Google to diversify its money making. That’s key for the company’s long-term health since it derives nearly all its revenue (nearly $5.5 billion in the third quarter of 2010) from online ads, with the majority of that coming from text ads on its own properties. 
 
 Google is seeking to differentiate itself from Amazon and its popular Kindle reader by selling books that can be read on a wide range of devices, from iPhones, iPads and Android-based devices, along with computers running any browser that can use JavaScript. Books can also be read on Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s E Reader, but not on Amazon’s Kindle — because of compatibility issues with the Adobe copyright management DRM attached to the e-books, Google said. 
 
 Book buyers will have all their books tied to their Google account, and the service will use Google checkout for payment. 
 
 Google’s inclusion of scanned books (those in the public domain) from its Books project could rile Amazon. Amazon told a federal court looking into the project that allowing Google to scan and sell millions of out-of-print books whose copyright owners can’t be found gives Google an unfair advantage. That objection comes despite Google’s offer to let Amazon and other booksellers resell the orphans, as well. 
 
 The fate of these so-called orphan books remains in the hands of a federal court judge in Manhattan, and are not available in the bookstore launching Monday. 
 
 Google is also partnering with independent bookstores, including Powell’s, to let them sell e-books on their website and share in the revenue from the sale. Independent and local bookstores can drop technology from the American Booksellers Association onto their sites to enable them to sell e-books through Google. 
 
 Google also hopes to create book-selling widgets that will let books be purchased through its service on any site on the net. It’s starting one such partnership with Goodreads, a leading site for book clubs. Starting Monday, users of that site can click on a book for their reading group straight from Google. 
 
 “The idea is that you buy where you are and read on devices you already own,” Crawford said. “We are committed to open structure, and building up a wider and wider retailer network.” 
 
 
 
 The decentralization of book-selling venues is a clever way to take on Amazon.com, which for many is synonymous with online book sales, and iTunes, which is closely tied to Apple’s iPad/iPod/Mac ecosystem and fighting to become as powerful in digital print sales as it is in digital music. 
 
 However, Google eBooks does not yet have an open-affiliate program like Amazon’s, that lets reviewers and website owners insert custom code into a link so they get a small percentage of every purchase initiated from that link. 
 
 Book readers will be able to switch from reading in a browser (Chrome and Safari only), to their mobile devices (Android and iPhone) to an e-book reader, without losing their place. However, with copy-protected books, there is no cut-and-paste, no printing and no lending or giving a book away. 
 
 Readers who travel outside U.S. borders will be able to read books already in their account, unless those books are not out of copyright in the country the reader is visiting. Users can’t purchase books when visiting the store from a non-U.S. IP address, the company said. 
 
 All the nation’s top publishers have signed onto the venture, making the service’s debut far less rocky than Google TV, which was quickly blocked by the websites of the country’s top broadcasters, despite the fact that integrating meant more viewers of online TV episodes that come with unskippable commercials. 
 
 All of the largest publishers, except for Random House, are opting for a model where the publishers set the price and Google and other retailers are simply acting as their agents. In this model, publishers and Google/retailers roughly split the price. 
 
 Other publishers and Random House are opting for a model where they sell books to Google at a set price and on a schedule of discounts, leaving the retailers free to price the books as they like. 
 
 Book prices will range between $1 and $300, since the service will include technical and academic publications, such as books from O’Reilly and university publishers. 
 
 Publishers can choose whether to lock down their books with DRM. Google also says it will have a strict privacy policy that forbids it from using your book-buying habits to advertise to, or profile readers. 
 
 Google also seems cognizant that it is under scrutiny from government regulators. Currently, when books in print come up in Google and Google book-search results, Google includes links to places to buy them online, including Amazon.com. That behavior won’t change, the company said, but Google eBooks will now be one of the options. 
 
 Google hopes to layer social features into the service in the near future and says the infrastructure is in place to let people buy both a digital and paper copy of a book in a bundle. ||||| Stock Chart for Facebook Inc (FB) 
 
 Facebook Inc. (FB) fell in late trading after its first earnings report as a public company showed a slower sales gain and narrower profit margins, failing to allay the concerns over growth that have sliced shares 29 percent. 
 
 Operating margin, excluding certain costs, was 43 percent in the second quarter, a decline from 53 percent a year earlier, amid a fourfold surge in sales and marketing expenses. Revenue rose 32 percent, the slowest pace on record, and payments- related sales were $192 million, below the $199.3 million average prediction from analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. 
 
 Facebook executives led by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, addressing analysts for the first time since the company’s May 17 initial public offering, issued no growth forecasts and said little else to reassure investors who fret that the company is overvalued. The largest social network is adding users faster than it can generate ad sales, the company said, reiterating remarks it made on the cusp of the IPO. 
 
 “It has become a show-me story,” said Nabil Elsheshai, a senior equity research analyst at Thrivent Financial. “The problem is deceleration, and there wasn’t anything from an outlook perspective that would indicate that is going to stop.” 
 
 Facebook shares slumped 12 percent to as low as $23.75 after the results were released. It had dropped 8.5 percent to $26.85 by the close in New York, and it’s down from $38 at the IPO. 
 
 Expenses Surge 
 
 Sales increased to $1.18 billion, Menlo Park, California- based Facebook said in a statement today. That compares with an average estimate of $1.16 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Monthly active users rose to 955 million, exceeding the 950.1 million prediction by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. 
 
 The revenue increase was dwarfed by an increase in spending on marketing and sales, which surged to $392 million. The company reported a net loss of $157 million, or 8 cents a share, and profit excluding certain costs of 12 cents a share. 
 
 Today’s report and conference call -- the mostly highly anticipated earnings release since Google Inc.’s inaugural figures in 2004 -- gave management its first chance since May to make a case that Facebook deserves a higher price relative to earnings than 98 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500. 
 
 “A little bit of earnings guidance, a little bit of optimism about future performance would have been nice,” said Jordan Rohan, analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in New York, who has a hold rating on Facebook. “Facebook trades at a premium to many companies, including Google, and is only growing at a slightly faster pace than companies like Google.” 
 
 Twitter, Google 
 
 Shareholders sought assurances that the company can keep users engaged amid rising competition from Twitter Inc. and Google and that it can overcome challenges making money from advertising on mobile devices. 
 
 Facebook said in May that sales growth wasn’t keeping pace with user expansion as more members accessed the service with mobile phones. The number of ads delivered in the U.S. in the second quarter decreased 2 percent even as the number of daily users increased 10 percent, Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman said on the conference call. 
 
 “Ad impressions continued the recent trend of growing more slowly than users as more of our usage is on mobile devices,” Ebersman said. “This trend is particularly true in markets such as the U.S., where smartphone use is expanding rapidly.” 
 
 Facebook has had little time to gain traction in mobile advertising, having just announced its inaugural mobile- advertising platform in February. 
 
 Mobile Challenges 
 
 Zuckerberg, who gave opening remarks on the call, said mobile is a key area of focus for the company. Mobile users, who make up more than half of the membership, are more active than counterparts who use only the desktop version, he said. 
 
 “Mobile is a huge opportunity for Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “Our goal is to connect everyone in the world. And over the next five years, we expect 4 or 5 billion people to have smartphones. That’s more than twice as many people as have computers today.” 
 
 Early results on mobile ads show some promise, according to AdParlor, which provides services for marketers. Click-through rates are 15 times higher on mobile than on desktops, while the pricing is 30 percent less, according to AdParlor. 
 
 Owing to the success of new services, Facebook should boost both mobile and desktop advertising revenue in the future, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on the call. Still, the company must educate companies about how they should advertise on a social service, still a relatively new avenue for marketers, she said. 
 
 Like TV 
 
 “It took a long time for the TV market and advertising to be truly understood, it took a long time for search, and I think we’re still in that learning curve with a lot of our clients,” Sandberg said. “If our ads work, and we continue to make our ads work and they work for advertisers and our users, we’ll be able to educate the market over time.” 
 
 Facebook raised $16 billion in the May 17 IPO, the largest ever for a technology company. Yet its debut was marred by technical glitches, and the stock only managed to close above $38 on the first day of trading. The company had first proposed a price range of $28 to $35 before raising it to $34 to $38 just days before the IPO. 
 
 Facebook derives most of its revenue from ads that reach users as they post comments, embed videos or check photos uploaded to the site by friends. The company also makes money when users pay for digital items, including on games made by Zynga Inc. (ZNGA) Facebook shares were weighed down earlier today after Zynga announced earnings that missed analysts’ estimates. 
 
 Progress Made 
 
 Facebook is making progress in some areas, including online display advertising, which includes photos and other graphical elements. Facebook will have 16.8 percent of the U.S. market this year, after grabbing the top spot from Yahoo! Inc. last year, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York. Google will have 16.5 percent, up from 13.8 percent last year and Yahoo’s share will be 9.1 percent, down from 10.8 percent. 
 
 Users are also spending more time on the service. Average time spent online increased 5.1 percent in June to 400.2 minutes, or more than six-and-a-half hours, after a gain of less than 1 percent the previous month in the U.S., according to researcher ComScore Inc. (SCOR) 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
– The media gave us plenty of predictions for 2010, and plenty of them simply didn’t come true. AOL News lists some of the most glaring: Job growth will begin again. Newsweek predicted it unemployment would fall “below 9%,” but it was never less than 9.5%. Republicans won’t storm the midterms. The National Review foresaw “good, though not great, gains.” The GOP won 63 House seats. Twitter will fizzle. Tell that to the 100 million new users this year, CNBC. We’ll start riding Google Wave. Or so thought CNN. Google shut it down within a year of its debut. Netbooks will be hot. CNBC was wrong here, too: sales sunk. The iPad won’t sell. More than 4 million buyers proved Infoworld.com incorrect. Americans will use mobile devices like credit cards. So said reichental.com. Swiped your smartphone lately?