For me personally: I think the future of the web will be more geared towards offline, only managed online, so these are some that pop up in my head right now. First the ingredients:

Facebook novelty wears off

There is already talks about "Facebook adaption rate in UK dropping off" and similar for most online social networking sites. Facebook suicides are common, I have several friends who have killed their Facebook profiles. In short, after the first "love" has died out with social networking people start to think sites like Facebook actually drain more energy than it gives. Besides, deleting apps you never wanted sent by "friends" that you have lost touch with (probably for a reason), isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Non-instrusive services and "communities" gain better foothold

In the backlash of Facebook, enter services like Flickr, Upcoming, Dopplr and Twitter. They ask nothing of you. They don't show you ads. If you want to contribute, fine, they will help you do so, if you don't want to, just browse, and in the cases of Flickr and Upcoming they actually help you sort out things in your offline world, only making it visible online. I am part of several groups in both Flickr and Upcoming where I meet the other group members more or less regularly and the only common denominator is that we are members of the same site/group and that we share interests (Photography, Gigs, Web Development etc).

Unlike Facebook, which allows me to keep in electronic touch with "friends" I normally don't socialize with any longer, Flickr and Upcoming helps me do things off-line, with likeminded people. Flickr and Upcoming are apps-free, clutter-free, spam-free, ad-free, clever and to the point.

Adobe Air and desktop apps that go online

I also think "online" will be different from a marketing perspective, with desktop apps built in Adobe Air, that connects to the internet but doesn't take the long route via your browser.

This also will mean we know a lot more about the user and their setup, not to mention their interests which means we will know if they are interested in what you have to sell, AND that they have capabilities to see anything/everything we throw at them.

API's

Application Programming Interfaces (API) will hit home everywhere on most sites that have/provide data and/or services.
API’s are about enabling other sites to connect to, and use the data provided by your service. What better way to market your excellent service than to let someone else (users and other services) do it for you? Flickr, Upcoming, Twitter, Dopplr, Google Maps, YouTube etc are all excellent examples of this and their API's have played a big part in their spread and uptake.

iPhone's competition forces changes to how we see, and create, mobile internet

It is not a secret that the iPhone has already done this, but only for its current users. What the iPhone has highlighted though is the benefits of being able to use mobile internet in a proper graphical way (often via an API with a new presentation layer), much like what we are used to in our computers (WAP anyone? Didn't think so…). iPhone took the first step, now Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Samsung etc, who hold the larger chunks of market share are all dying to get in there, all of which is a good thing for us as creators of services. Microsoft has signed deals with Nokia for pushing out Silverlight, Google Android starts off with the HTC phones, but will expand their offering soon to other phone makers.

OpenID will hit home

OpenID, already being adopted by the big names out there, will mean that users only will need one login, for all their online needs, despite them being signed up to various services by various providers. You don't have to remember hundreds of passwords any more.

Conclusion: So…the future of the web will resemble…

Data owners will realise that it is more important for people to use and trust their service than anything else, as this builds current and future revenue streams. This will lead to sites and services that are specialised, but really good at what they do, with API's that make them accessible on all devices (mobile or not) and especially within other services you might be using (Facebook or not), possibly by tying them all together in an Air desktop application created by someone like Netvibes.

Or it will be completely different and you can either ignore this e-mail, or save it for future pub laughs.

Now, all of the tips given in that article are sound and reasonable, and I agree on pretty much the entire article, but I also know from experience that what Joel Spolsky describes in his classic Iceberg article is completely true as well, even to this day.

It is obviously the combination of knowing both those two contradictory facts that creates a problem for developers. Most non-developers have a real problem understanding the complexities, thinking and planning that goes on behind/before/during development. -"How hard can it be? It is all THERE!! " *pointing at screen with pretty Photoshop mockup*

When it comes to web/marketing led development those pretty mockups from the designers quite often is what sold the project to the client in the first place, so there is rarely a way around this, the projects are most often only given go-ahead after visual designs have been presented. Too often the question "what does it look like? " is treated as more important to "what can it do? " or "which business problem are we solving? ".

I think this is because these presentations mostly are held by marketing people in the agencies, and the audience often is the marketing department of the client. They like pretty pixels. It makes the product feel more tangible. "Brand exercise" has become synonymous with "where is my logo placed in relation to the other things on the screen, and what prominence does it have? ", and quite often forgetting that brand loyalty can be built by providing an awesome service that actually helps people to do things (apart from crying of happiness by looking at the clients logo) BUT that will take some time to actually develop/realise.

If it doesn't exist already someone has to build it from scratch. Quite often that someone is working in my team and he/she will need time chipping away on lines of code, which doesn't take the creative much further visually…it can even appear to have ground to a halt because "nothing new seems to be happening! " (and even more commonly, as the development takes time the client thinks it is alright to do changes to the designs whilst waiting, often without realising that adds even more development time).

Also, I often say "my team takes designs and from them they create experiences " but that is only true if there is an experience to be had in the first place. Surely said brands "do " something. Can't they "do " it, or something in line with that, online? Here's a thought: if you can't think of something you actually can do/give to your clients, are you ready to have a campaign/site/service/advertising?

Pretty much all the big brands online are based on good services first and foremost. I'm pretty sure Google (Search, Maps, Mail, Notes etc), Scrapblog , Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, YouTube, Netvibes etc didn't start their life spans as pixel perfect Photoshop mock-ups but instead started as a wild wacky idea and some experimenting from bored (or very lucky) developers somewhere, who were given a challenge by someone wanting to solve a [business] problem no one had thought about previously.

I'm not saying fun/entertaining marketing/advertising (only) exercises doesn't have their place, they do (and luckily we get to do quite a few of the good ones at work thanks to daring clients), but I AM saying the request "Make it more Web 2.0/Interactive please " is tricky to implement unless said exercise actually DOES something. "Shall I Ajax it up a bit then eh? " when it isn't needed surely can't be the best way to spend money for the client. We can of course do it. Should we?

That world exist, and right now as I'm typing this, a very late evening in the UK, they are getting ready for the morning sun to peek up any moment if it hasn't already. Yes, I'm talking east, I'm talking Asia (and if you're in the UK you might call it "The Orient"). They have the above scenario already. They had it yesterday and they will most probably have it tomorrow, and things that we take for granted both from a social and commercial perspective might not even register as a blip on their radar over there.

Social Networks
I just read this interesting article which highlights things that we might not think of by default in US/Europe. For example it teaches us that despite Facebook, with it's 60 million users, is nowhere near QQ in the Asian markets. QQ has a mind boggling 300 million users. At work our Asian offices did a campaign on QQ (for a client which is famous for many things, but also for MP3 players and lately a cool phone) which had an uptake of 50 million people actively using their little MP3 players with their QQ avatars within the QQ community. 50 million!!

Search Engine
If your pages doesn't turn up amongst the first results in Baidu chances are you are missing out on a rather large group of possible users. Baidu isn't just a threat to Google in China, but the roles are the other way around: Google is, somewhat, a distant threat to Baidu, however Baidu is safely holding on to about 66% of the Chinese market, where Google has about 26%. Imagine that dear westerner! If you start multiplying that with population you quickly realise that the Chinese search engine is absolutely massive when it comes to user base (and therefore potential revenue streams).

…and of course:
Oh yes, as for the that phone mentioned in the first paragraph: as it currently only has English as its input language the appeal for it on the Asian markets is limited at best (right now), which also would be the reason why no attempts have been made to get into that market just yet.

Now, all of this is of course "obvious" when we think about it, and when I travel to Asia I'm pretty prepared for all kinds of cultural differences, but at those times I'm mainly thinking about religions, food and…umm…BIG things. It of course makes sense that there are differences in online usage as well, and it isn't surprising that we in Europe/US perhaps not are thinking about them daily (as I'm sure I'm not alone in the UK having problems reading Chinese and Japanese web sites).

Still, at times the world seems like a really small place…and at other times it seems quite big indeed. Hmm. Should probably go to bed.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the latest update to Wordpress (which obviously powers this site), particularly the front-end for the admin section. One thing that has been a bug bear with all web applications is that they have security flaws and keep a constant stream of updates where the developers of said tools patch up their software, which is nice enough. However, it usually leads to large amounts of non-updated sites out there (most people perhaps aren't as vigilant in their updates as I am) even though Wordpress have been blessed with an "automatic upgrade tool" as a plug-in for some time, and which is The Awesome in case you haven't tried that one out.

I run a number of blogs (for myself and others) as well as a number of content managed sites and I was getting quite tired of the download -> unzip -> ftp route to updates, so anything that simplifies this process is a good thing in my book.

However, it gets better now with the new version of Wordpress, as there is now also automatic updating of all plug-ins, which normally is another security risk. When I updated this site I first updated the Automatic update plug-in, which now by the way has a completely automated option, and then I just had to click a few links in my plugin management to update everything else. Easy. Nice. Simple. Good. Well done both to the Wordpress team and to Keith Dsouza at Techie-Buzz for Wordpress Automatic Upgrade and definitely a thing that more apps and tools should consider taking up.

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