Americas Quarterly - Winter 2009

CONCLUSION BY EVAN HANSEN
How will the Internet change
in the next five years?
EVAN’S TOP TEN:

The key
challenge is
to maintain
the best
environment
for innovation
even for novice
technology
users.

1D a _e ata Is Supplanting Web Pages The Web is less and less “place” made of up “sites” that “surfers” find and xplore; it is increasingly a collection of data that we can fetch whenever we want, in any format. Think RSS on steroids. Care to see the latest news headlines but linked to the locations where the events took place and superimposed on a map? No problem. In this new environment, Web destinations become Web services,

whether you’re thinking of news, entertainment, travel, shopping, politics, or anything at all.

the phone or network provider. The Internet’s success came about because the cooperation of providers of PC operating systems and Internet services was not needed for innovation to take place. Users could come up with new applications and distribute them to others, and the business models of the early PC makers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were not threatened by this innovation—in fact, they were helped by them.

As many mobile phone providers seek to more comprehensively integrate access to the network with how their phones will be used (what applications they’ll run), we run the risk of providing a small set of useful

applications to a new round of networked users without the opportunity for those users to carry the applications further or take their network usage in entirely new—and unpredictable— directions.

The key challenge is to maintain the best environment for innovation, even for utterly novice technology users. In the short term, it means encouraging or subsidizing the deployment of open platforms— including mobile ones— defined as those platforms that can be reprogrammed by their users. ( Interestingly, Windows fits within this definition.) Over the long term, it means creating places within educational systems to inspire and affirm creative thought and experimentation; refocusing intellectual property laws to cultivate genuinely new contributions rather than merely locking in past advances; and ensuring fast, affordable, neutral broadband to anyone who wants it—using any device that hews to specified open protocols.

2Data Filtering With the emergence of the Web as a data service, effective filtering becomes paramount.

RSS readers are already buckling under the pressure of too much information. Three primary modes of filtering will

dominate: 1. Peer recommendations that identify community preferences by aggregating activities from a large body of contributors (Google PageRank, Digg, Last.fm); 2. Predictive tools that estimate preferences from the past behavior of individuals (Netflix, Amazon, Google Wiki); 3. Selected expert opinions that set recommendations unilaterally from a small group of authoritative sources (traditional media). Of these, peer recommendation is the one to watch.

EVAN HANSEN is editor-in-chief of Wired.com.

3Data Portability Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will continue to grow, but closed social destinations will give way to distributed social applications available anytime, anywhere. The so-called social graph—conceived as a map of everyone and their relationships to everyone else—will start to become defined and eventually made pervasive, establishing authenticated and persistent identity across the Web. For now, the major players here are Facebook Connect and Google

Friend Connect, with Facebook in the driver’s seat. The social graph will improve trust and insert greater social responsibility into online interactions and activities. It will also enable and extend social data filtering, improving and refining community-based peer recommendation engines.