Outlining 27 emerging technologies in its latest report, "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008," analyst firm Gartner predicted eight technology trends, including public virtual worlds, that will have a transformational business impact and that should be strongly considered for adoption by technology planners in the next 10 years.

According to the firm, virtual worlds are currently in the "Trough of Disillusionment" stage of Gartner's five-stage Hype Cycle, and are suffering from disillusionment due to inflated, unrealistic expectations during their peak of hype in 2007. Gartner forecasts that in the long term, however, virtual worlds will "represent an important media channel to support and build broader communities of interest."

Other technologies predicted to have transformational impact include cloud-computing, green IT, video telepresence, and microblogging.

Gartner also expects success for social computing platforms: "Following the phenomenal success of consumer-oriented social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, companies are examining the role that these sites, or their enterprise-grade equivalents, will play in future collaboration environments. The scope is also expanding to incorporate the notion of social "platforms," or environments for a broad range of developers to build on the basic application."