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Towards the end of training days people often say 'what does the online future look like?' or words to that affect.
Being a professional online 'translator' and communicator rather than a binary-eyed futurist, I don't have any genius insights beyond those of any online dude worth their digital dollar day rate.
But I do agree with William Gibson's fantastic accurate and catchy proclamation: 'The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet'.
Looking at bumps of tomorrow that are here now, but not yet distributed into the lives of normal people, I think that the more evenly distributed future has more of these four As and a T in it:
In detail -
Alternative worlds
Virtual worlds are part of every single persons online future. Absolutely. Second Life or not, our online experiences become more nuanced, more textured, more multi-dimensional, more mixed media, and more immersive every month, every year. Second Life is a window into the future. Snow Crash is a window into the future. When we fire up our online experience, will we open a browser or a virtual world? Will we even fire up anything or will it be running constantly, pervasively?
I had a wonderful experience shared at my most recent training day, for marketers at Cisco - tech savvy people. A lady there had attended a conference in Second Life. She said that after about 15 minutes she'd forgotten she was in a virtual world - she was absorbed by the content, was asking questions, was involved, IMMERSED. She'd forgotten the medium, just like you do when you watch a great film in a dark cinema, or here an amazing piece of music through headphones.
Yes alternative worlds are currently inhabited by a funny old mix of men pretending to be women, people seeking 'sex', uber-geeks, and out-of-touch-fantastists. But so was IRC, so were forums, so were so many of the meaninful, interesting online innovations previously. This is part of the future.
Online social networks will continue to become more and more nuanced and the lines between them and alternative or virtual worlds will blur.
And check out experiments like Justin.TV, and how technology and real-life are blurred for him - is that not the start of cyborg? Is pervasive personal technology, and even crusty crap like smart devices and bluetooth headsets, first steps to a blurred on/offline existence.
Alternative worlds...
Atomisation
Cue the usual start: in the future (now, but not evenly distributed yet) your online presence will NOT be a monolithic thing, a giant gleaming tower in the desert, a 'destination' - it will be a tapestry, a mosaic, made up of many parts, each different and unique yet bound by a cohesive whole (or maybe not).
The here and now of all of this, the first and most obvious iteration is widgets. These are the past as much as the future - Ivan will tell you that YouTube is a widget, AdSense is a widget...etc..
But big brands are getting the whole widget opportunity (a few of them are working with us ;-) and starting to appreciate a future where our online personality - as individuals - and our online presence as organisations, which is distributed far and wide, across the network, across the plumbing of RSS and Twitter-like services.
See how lifestreaming seeks to make the mosaic from the individual online parts, reforming an already atomised online presence. The future will be atomised...
FuckedCompany.com, Satisfaction, Google and grassroots-campaigning-on-steroids via online social networks mean that you can't hide the bad news, you can't control the message and you cannot stifle the people.
Every website, from Wall-mart to your ruddy-faced posh talking local solicitor will have Amazon-style ratings and reviews functionality on their web presences. You can and will rate everyone in a public forum.
This encourages marketers to go back to their marketing textbooks, remember that a big part of their job was to find out what people actually want and get it built, and so life for everyone gets better - products get better, competitors get stronger, markets get more efficient, marketers become happier because they're making a difference rather than making a lot of noise.
Radical transparency will become the norm: intranets will become wikis for public consumption and sharing; crowdsourcing will replace traditional expensive and slow R&D / market research. Maybe :)
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