Here is a great, short video on just how powerful the web has become over the past decade and how much it has changed. How much more will it change in the next year? The next 5 years? The next 10 years? We can imagine and then make our imaginings reality.
What do you imagine will change significantly over the next year on the web?
I see a lot more worldwide collaboration through sites like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Friendfeed is really interesting. It can be a place for you to create a hub of all your online content, join groups of people with the same interests, and allow you to work with them. It’s not as popular as Facebook yet, but it is more powerful. I would consider Friendfeed to be pushing the envelope to Web 3.0.
Our new American President is a totally wired guy. I’ll write a separate post about not taking away his Blackberry and why, but Barack Obama will be our first truly internet-savvy President. He will be the first President of the United States to have a laptop on his desk, and I’m sure it won’t be for show. He and his team will use the web in new ways to effect massive change within government and in society.
If you don’t believe me, go back through his entire campaign. He developed a massive grassroots following by using the internet to connect with individual people and mobilize them to help him disseminate his message broadly and one-on-one. He used new technologies on his volunteers’ site to make grassroots activism much easier. I made personal phone calls to key battleground states during the campaign and I was able to record the results of each call as I made it. I talked to people I don’t personally know about a candidate. The state I focused on calling the most turned blue for the first time since 1964. I attended webinar training sessions to learn about the tools on the mybarackobama.com website. I have an account on Change.gov. I still get emails from the transition team and I expect that will continue throughout the Obama administration. Everything will be far different than it has ever been in government.
How far can computing combined with the internet take us? It’s up to us to decide and then to act by using the web as effectively as we can to make the world a better place.
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