Marc's Voice

Five year predictions

Eric Schmidt had some really intelligent insights into what will be prevelant web trends five years from now.

Summarizing:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Here’s more - from me:

• Digital Lifestyle Aggregation will be the predominant start page.  Users will have an integrated environment, where they’ll aggregate their friends, content and web services - and it’ll be a highly customizable environment - suitably personalized not only for the user’s content preferences, but also their aesthetics, usage level, age and sex.
• Facebook will still be leading the ’social networking’ race because of their open minded, innovative approach - blurring the edge between closed platform and open standards leader
• Our Open Stack and the open standards it represents will have gained in popularity and influence.  1B people will enjoy dataportability, interoperability, participating in distributed friending and access controls and refuse to be controlled by any single platform.  This will force ALL the major platforms to adhere to the principles of being open, which continue to feed our movement.
• MySpace will be doing deals with whoever they can - grabbing as music money as they can - which they should.
• Another ‘Google’ will be born
• LinkedIn will have some major new competitor appear and bite them in the ass - because open always wins and LinkedIn ain’t open.
• Adobe will have shrunken by 35%, which causes them to merge with Aviary.