The future of the Web

At Citylive.be we have a strong management team. Our CEO also understands technology, our CMO knows how projects need to be managed and our CFO can put himself in the shoes of the user. This makes my job as a CTO much easier. (If you don't know the abbreviations in the previous sentence, we looked them up on Wikipedia too :))

Last week we were discussing the company strategy and ended up in mapping out the evolution of the internet as a frame of reference. Now that trendwatchers are publishing all kinds of predictions about what's going to happen in 2008, we might just as well add our 2 cents worth and share with you what we came up with regarding the future of the internet:

Evolution of the web towards mobile

Current situation: Web .20

Web 2.0 is all about user participation. Users play a role in contributing content to applications. The main organization form is however still a document-centric approach: each separate application is delivered to the users as a separate web site with separate user management tools and a separate runtime environment, delivering a set of pages that together make up the application.

Step 1: The web becomes a platform

There is an evolution to let social networking sites offer their capabilities to third party developers. This means external applications can run in the context of the social networking site. The advantage to this is that the user can manage the applications he uses, his own web presence, his relation and communication with friends and his privacy all in one place. To application developers, the networking site offers distribution, delivery, user management and possibly a runtime platform. This turns the site into an application platform. This evolution will continue, turning the web into a platform.

Step 2: The web platforms will open up

After maturing, web platforms will open up the tight links between their application platform and social networking functions. Open social is already doing some preliminary efforts in this area. The expectation is that application platforms will focus on catalog management, application distribution and runtime environment provisioning. Their focus will be on delivering the same applications on multiple devices (desktop web browser, mobile phone, TV, fridge computer, car computer) and providing the application developer with an authoring environment that produces portable applications across the different runtimes.

The social networking sites on the other hand will function as containers to hold the applications that the user manages in the application platform. Users will be a member of several social networking sites, indicating their activity in various social groups. But they will only choose 1 application platform. In the social networking site, they will indicate what applications they want to expose to their friends on that platform and what applications they want to hide.

Step 3: Application development becomes standardized

When internet technology is present in car computers, fridge computers and set top boxes, the market will soon standardize around a de facto capability discovery and applications runtime environment. This will probably be a widget paradigm with a flavor of AJAX as enabling technology.

When that happens, the different authoring environments of the application platforms will start to output code that is compatible with this de facto standard, with probably some “custom extensions” for early market leaders that want to keep a competitive edge.

Step 4: Contextual intelligence is handed back to the user

An important initial differentiator of application platforms will be their contextual behavior. Based on user location, time, activity and profile, the platforms will push applications and content to the users. The social networking sites will also try to offer contextual awareness, based on the knowledge they have on how you relate to your friends and what interactions you have with them.

Once mass market adoption of standardized cross-platform application development is achieved, the contextual capabilities will be offered to the application developer as an interface to enrich their applications. This will drive a demand for standardization, allowing users to take control of all of their profile data. This can be personal data entered by users in various applications, but also data generated by platforms through usage analysis and pattern recognition. The assumption is that specialized parties will emerge that provide the user with the service of securing his profile data and offering contextual services on behalf of the user. Note that this does not exclude contextual advertising: Given the perfect opt-in platform, users probably will opt for a mix between commercially oriented and commercially neutral content.

Step 5: A new type of advertising agency

When the majority of users have the capability to decide for themselves what advertisements they are going to see, this will of course influence the type of advertisements that are going to be created. The classical advertising formats will be exchanged for formats that provide a mix between information, commercial message, entertainment and useful functionality. The boundary between advertising and content will become even more blurred then it is today.

The democratization of the technology and the distributed contextual architecture will enable advertisement decisions to be made at a local level, close to the user and in the environment where he lives. This means that local shops, merchants and brands will manage their own advertising mix together with content partners. Narrowcasting effectively becomes the predominant model for local advertising, next to broadcasting for brand awareness.