Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

I am an avid user of Friendfeed. I am constantly monitoring it, and constantly posting to the the service. Yet I hardly ever post directly to Friendfeed. I use a desktop client called feedalizr to monitor my Friendfeed subscriptions and feedalizr allows me to seamlessly post to Twitter, flickr. Friendfeed and Jaiku from my desktop. Friendfeed simply aggregates all my posts, and displays it to me, without me ever having to worry about where the posts originated from.

I share a lot of articles on Google Reader.I use Google Reader as my one-stop portal for reading the feeds I subscribe to. Yet I hardly ever visit the sites on which the feeds originate, and to be honest, I have no need to. I find it easier to navigate from post to post in Google Reader, in a consistent manner, than I find to be the case on the sites themselves.  Friendfeed picks up these posts too, and displays them to me, seamlessly integrated into my information stream.

The point of this is that I obtain a great deal, if not the majority, of information I use from the Web without ever visiting the sites the data originated on. Yes – I am technically literate. Yes, I could probably be described as an alpha-geek, early adopter type of person. Nevertheless I believe that virtually all new products on the web grow through a first stage of adoption (and blessing) by the tech community, before it reaches the main stream. I do not apologise for this.

So  – let’s assume that early adopter usage does give valid information on future trends. I want to take a big step forward, and envision the web as it may be in the far future, five years from now…

This web of the future will be a web where information rules. Do not make the mistake of thinking that data drives today’s mainstream web. It does not – the user consumes pre-packaged, pre-structured content, in a less linear fashion than television offers, but still it is purely content that drives the web. I believe that in future  the average user may be much more aware of information (as opposed to content), in the shape of  feeds. Feeds will will have a large deal of information (metadata) associated with them. Users will choose to consume feeds based on the information contained in the metadata. A feed will have reputation associated with it – also contained in the metadata, and verifiable by public reputation services.

Every end-user will consume feeds via  a “window” (nothing to do with Microsoft)  which may very well be a browser. The window will allow the user to view the feeds in which she is interested, and to mash-up these feeds. The user herself will use freely available tools to extract the metadata from the feed, and use this metadata to intelligently integrate the feed contents. The feeds will contain links to all kinds of media – video, music, pictures, blog posts, profiles, family trees, etc., etc.

The feed viewers will rely heavily on information-exchange standards to allow users to use any theme and any data, anywhere. The widespread acceptance of the W3C recommendations and standards for the Semantic Web will enable software developers to create information streams that are client and platform agnostic. The same mechanisms will enable feed consumers to share their feeds, aggregations and syntheses with other users.

The end result of all this will be that every user will have control over the way information is displayed to them. Every user will decide how to mash-up their information streams. Every user will decide how to display and decorate their feed windows. The job of today’s big content providers will be to become information providers.

The sought-after media skills of the future will be to mark up information and add value to it in a way that your competitors do not.

In future, web “products” will be:

- Feeds

- Themes

- Interpretation tools

- Mash-up tools

In future, web products will NOT be web applications. Inasmuch as the static sites of Web 1.0 has been replaced by the user generated content of Web 2.0,  Web 2.0 applications will be replaced by applications with which to format, shape, decorate and display information streams. This will represent the true evolution from the document-based web to the semantic web.