I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction of the future of the Internet.

I recently skimmed through a book called "Groundswell", written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  The last chapter was an extrapolation of the current state of social software that they call the groundswell.

The future that they believe will be here within five years is one where everyone is in constant communication through blogs, ratings/commenting systems, social networking software and instant messaging.  You will get notifications from friends, work, entertainment, etc. all the time.

I’m not buying it.

With all the self publishing occurring, the amount of information on the Internet is growing exponentially and as a result of this trend, users will feel information overload.  This has been discussed since the 90's when there were fewer web pages.

The Web 2.0 trend is a bubble that's going to burst and be shrunk by users filtering out all the stuff that they don't want to see or sort through manually.  Just like e-mail spam filters, there will be self-generated filters on the information you search for on the Internet.

Search profiles stored in a search engine that automatically filter your information through a point of view, a set of criteria, your past viewing history or comparing your profile to results others have searched for and viewed (Wisdom of the Crowds).

Even following a single prolific blogger can be hard because everyone is very busy trying to cram more and more into a day.  Internet filters that filter through blog posts and other information will be coming soon.  And it will be delivered to the user like RSS feeds work today.

Information retrieval improvements and information filtering will be the next new big thing on the Internet, Web 3.0 if you will.  And boxes instead of rounded corners.


"We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." --Criswell