As our culture shifts towards greater immediacy and connectivity enabled by faster mobile networks and loaded handsets, we’re witnessing a profound change in consumer expectations that is having an effect across multiple industries from finance and technology to media and entertainment. Much of this is being fueled by the development of applications that seek to capture emerging markets in the areas of interface, information and advertising among others, and be seen as the industry standard.

To that end, the BBC reports on some interesting fallout from the 2009 MobileBeat Conference held recently in San Francisco, touting mobile applications to be as big as, if not bigger than the internet. To make sense of this, I try to think of these individual applications as bite-sized pieces of the web-at-large, often more specific than an entire website, that provide users with a personal (sometimes customizable) experience based on the performance of a particular task.

With that specificity in mind, it’s no wonder that the market is becoming flooded with competitors – Apple’s store alone hosts over 65,000 applications and recently saw its 1.5 billionth download. But while there appears to be no end to this growth, a combination of a plateau in users (as web-enabled phones become commonplace), captured niches and overall market saturation, will lead to fewer surefire opportunities.

Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store, sees this point coming sooner than many think. ”They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development.” With initial costs for time and R&D no longer providing guaranteed return on investment, these businesses become riskier propositions, sending the talent pool elsewhere and contributing to a further tapering off.  A trend that should benefit those that remain for the long haul.

Another facet that needs to be refined is the current “retail” model that buries users in a sea of applications that rely too heavily on “one-hit wonders,” while giving smaller developers less chance of survival. Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was not sure the consumer or the industry needed any more application stores. ”The App Store is flawed – right now [it] is just a bucket of apps. You need to get beyond that bucket and give the consumer the opportunity to wander down a really relevant aisle of content and applications that they can get access to.”

The bottom line appears to be that as this market continues to emerge and evolve the smart money will be on the players that best leverage their audience and platform with an idea or service that is transformative, novel or at the very least good for “must-have” fad.