Loving the predictions over at Read/WriteWeb
Expert Systems; mentioned in Steven Spalding’s excellent post about “web 3.0”, an expert system is “a software agent that takes user input, runs it through a knowledge database and then generates an output using fancy technologies like neural nets”. Ten years from now, wrote Spalding, “Expert Systems won’t only be designed for general cases, but will be able to be easily generated to understand individuals tastes. […] Imagine a world where your computer would generate a profile, a meme map about you based on your interactions with the web and refine your experience based on this map.” While this has things in common with the agents described in #4 and #5, it is more about having a vast knowledge db to refine your daily lifestyle.
User-controlled, open Internet Identity; Thomas Huhn pointed out that “forming your online identity, controlling what personal data you give to whom and aggregating all your and your environments lifestreams in an open social network is simply essential for the further development of the web.” We’re seeing this develop now (it’s sometimes referred to as, you guessed it, Identity 2.0), but the scenario Thomas described is 5+ years into the future.
Data retrievel/manipulation agents; Commenter #45, Bill, wrote that we can expect in the future a “a metaweb tool” that comes with “an AI program”. This device will do data retrieval and manipulation for users, interacting directly with people.
There are 7 more over at the above link. Definitely feel that a central strand is that we are seeing a convergence of functionality but an explosion of the concept of the destination, that’s to say why should facebook be the owners of our identity, why should google hold our search preferences and email, documentation and just about everything else.
Shouldn’t we have some form of ownership of our virtual selfs? Allowing different services to interact with virtual selfs would provide the same level of service, but our data (or at least a reference to our data) would remain in one place (well, maybe not one place, but one object) for us to use with as many or few places as possible.
Also this backs-up comments I made back in April 2006. So makes me feel like a digital sooth-sayer.