The following are the five strongest Internet trends that I see in the research I do every day:

1. Open: Notwithstanding the best efforts of the old-guard music industry, the Internet is trending towards greater and greater openness, raising issues about IP, copyright, and value-adding. Even Google, famous for jealously guarding its ’secret sauce’ algorithm, is getting into the open swing of things with its work on OpenSocial, a standard development system that allows apps to be created for a variety of social networks. This system challenges Facebook, which led the pack in opening its platform to developers but could now be threatened by a platform-independent option.

   The challenge for all of us web companies is figuring out what it is we bring to the table that we can charge for. Right now the primary solution is advertising. Is that all there is?

2. Fluid: One-click filesharing, tags, markups, trackbacks, and feeds combine to create an Internet whose content is less and less tied to a particular source. Mashups, edits, and comments produce material that is truly alive, as opposed to a book, for example. Try to pin the Internet down: you can’t.

3. Personal: The Internet exists to serve people, and people are coming into their power on it. I agree with Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid:
   

   ?it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.

4. Vertical: Greater automation, improved algorithms, and increased user sophistication demand that the long tail be instantly accessible for anything we should want. Eurekster allows anyone to create a topic-specific search engine. Ning allows anyone to create a custom social network. AltSearchEngines covers 1,000 alternatives to the Big Five search engines, many of them focused on specific types of queries like wine or web icons. Unless you’re Google, the Internet is placing less and less value on being a generalist.

5. Collaborative: Wikipedia. Flickr. Facebook. MySpace. Second Life. Need I say more?

What trends have you noticed?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 5:09 am and is filed under General technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.