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I would like to add Richard McManus to the list of Web X.0 prognosticators. Today, amidst the deafening echo of Apple news he has managed to arrange a great post on future web trends. Some of the points that he enumerates, I touched base on in my epic tome on Web 3.0 but a lot of the article provides fresh insight for any web futurist.

The Future

A few of the more interesting points that he touched on are in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, the “International Web” and Virtual Worlds. Here are some excerpts,

Artificial Intelligence

…Numenta is an exciting new company by tech legend Jeff Hawkins, which is attempting to build a new, brain-like computing paradigm - with neural networks and cellular automata. In english this means that Numenta is trying to enable computers to tackle problems that come easy to us humans, like recognizing faces or seeing patterns in music.

Spend enough time in AI and you realize that much of this technology has been floating around in academia forever. It’s interesting to see a small subset of it migrating into commercial applications. Whether one needs a complex neural net to accomplish a task that might be better suited for brute-force techniques like Waveform Matching, only time will tell, but AI has always been the computer scientists pet project — it’s about time someone did something with it.

International Web

For most web 2.0 apps and websites (R/WW included), the US market makes up over 50% of their users. Indeed, comScore reported in November 2006 that 3/4 of traffic to top websites is international. comScore said that 14 of the top 25 US Web properties now attract more visitors from outside the US than from within. That includes the top 5 US properties - Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft, Google Sites, and eBay.

I know this as a fact. Many of you are not based in the U.S. and as ubiquitous broadband proliferates this number will just grow. Any new developments in the web will need to take into account the global nature of the internet. Web services like Facebook have been slow in embracing this, much to their chagrin.

Virtual Worlds

It’s not just about digital life, but also making our real life more digital. As Alex Iskold explained, on one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.

Second Life is certainly not the future of virtual worlds, but it might just be its mid-wife. If I were taking bets, the real technological revolution will combine the open format of a world like Second Life with the entertainment value of something like World of Warcraft. The point is that in order for virtual worlds to be truly integrated into our lives, they need to fulfill real human desires. Not only catering to the creatives and the crass (Second Life) but also catering to those who are looking for an escape from the doldrums of modern existence (WoW).

The company that can put both of these into one package, and get the echo chamber to take notice may, in fact, change the way we consume media forever.

Web 2.0 Roundup

As always when you try to peek into the future, much of it is speculation, some of it has existed for quite sometime and detractors will always say that all of it is completely off base. I think they are missing the point. Whenever you try to predict the future, what you are doing is looking at the world through a lens. The real fun is seeing how close your lens mirrors the truth.

Do I have anymore predictions about the future of the web? Well, most of my new ones involve the sociological evolution of information culture. A topic I’ll discuss at length some other time.

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