Andreas Göldi of German tech blog netzwertig.com has taken a look at the technology trends that have made the headlines in the past half year or so, and contrasted them with some things that have either gone unnoticed or may be the bigger deal on the long run. Anyone who reads German should check out his post. If you prefer English, here’s the run-down of Andreas’ assessments in brief.

If you have a overhyped/underhyped topic that should be on the list, go ahead and comment!

Microblogging

Overhyped: Twitter – Apart from being down all the time, it’s too geeky for the mainstream and has too much noise.

Underhyped: Status messages – Facebook, Skype, XING, people tend to like to tell other what they are doing. So the Twitter idea is great but lacks context and historical orientation. Friendfeed-like aggregators might help.

Application platforms

Overhyped: Facebooks app platform and open social – Bottom line, facebook apps are mostly useless and extremely hard to monetise. SocNets are important because of the traffic they accumulate, but the apps on them haven’t really taken off.

Underhyped: Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine – Both app platforms are a basis for building highly scalable web apps. This will help startups scale without the hassle of maintaining own infrastructure. Of course, they are not as sexy as Facebook apps, but the impact will be dramatic.

Mobile phones

Overhyped: Multimedia production on the mobile – 10Mpix cams in your phone are nice, but still not as good as dedicated digital cameras. Also shaky mobile video à la Qik and Kyte are great, but who else than hardcore Scobleizer fans will look at them longer than a minute?

Underhyped: GPS in mobiles – It’s finally here, and we will see loads of location-based services built on GPS in the coming years.

Online Advertising

Overhyped: Ads on SocNets – Loads of buzz, no money, and no idea how that could change for the better.

Underhyped: Behavioural Targeting – As soon as privacy and data protection issues are clarified, this will skyrocket – and might even bring revenue to SocNets!

Search

Overhyped: Semantic search – The promise is huge (nothing less than the next Google!), the delivery is poor so far.

Underhyped: Human intelligence – There is no better tool for finetuning search algorithms than the human brain. Even Google uses people (imagine that!) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk even is a business model.

Online video

Overhyped: User-generated video – What gets most hits on YouTube? Professional content does. That’s the beginning of the end of user generated cats’n'dogs content.

Underhyped: Professional content on the web – Hulu has proven critics wrong by becoming a success, with high quality content. (ed. note: I doubt this is the right answer to the decline of TV)

Information consumption

Overhyped: RSS – Even early adopters suffer from RSS overload today and it has not taken off as a mainstream technology yet. Joe Average is overwhelmed by the information influx anyway and doesn’t want even more through feeds.

Underhyped: Information filtering – Automated filters that determine what’s hot and relevant are still rare, and there is little going on beyond TechMeme and Rivva.