so i’ve written a contribution that’s more about the ‘imaginary
history’ side of the futures inquiry.

“Memes collide with faultlines in the digi-civic turbulence”.
http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/The_shape_of_civil_society_to_come%20

good luck with it all

Steve Goldner
By far, the best definition I have seen anywhere … http://bit.ly/aAREL

Kimberly McCabe
As people become more social media savvy we will begin to see more “channels” set up or interfaces that allow consumers to drill down into their topic of interest by allowing us to be more selective about what content reaches our social networks. We’ll have Tivo for Social Media navigation.
Links:

* http://www.oshyn.com

Rui de Almeida
Hello Suw.
In my opinion, social networking will go to something more social and total network.
I mean, we will have more sophisticated tools such as 3D virtual worlds, multi-user audio/video live streamings. Wikis and other colaborative organized online contents will become more popular. We will not need to build our networks, because they are built from the moment we connect into them.

Roland Van Ipenburg
In the last 15 years I’ve seen the internet change from an academic platform to a mainstream western marketing tool. The medium didn’t change it’s invading new users, but the new users changed the medium. If in 15 years Chinese, Indian and African internet users by far outnumber the demographics we now have using social technology, social technology will be much more based on non-western culture which might be even further away from the liberté, égalité, fraternité based origins of the old internet. Our current western social technology will then have a status comparable to what usenet is today for the average social technology user. Then the “Era of Social Commerce” might not be exactly what a mainly capitalist society would expect it to be, it could also be the “Era of Transparent Communism”.

Alonzo (Lon) Hosford
Portability and transparency.

Betsy Gamrat
I think the key driving force will be profit.

These systems are expensive to build, unless there is a clear opportunity to recoup the initial investment and fund future maintenance and extension, there is no business model to make it viable.

Opportunities:
+ Subscription fees
+ Advertising
+ Partnerships
+ Rewards programs

First thanks for the interviews, if you are looking for scenario plannuing etc, they are great resources at: http://www.iftf.org/

Roberto

I think that one factor — and possibly *the* most significant — should be added to this inquiry: Creativity.

Projecting ourselves into the future can be useful, but in a way what’s really going to affect things is already happening right now: creative people are sitting down at their workdesks/studios/etc. and are following through on new, crazy and often seemingly random and quite unpredictable ideas. To me this is the major “X-factor” that cannot really be accounted for.

Someone makes somethings, somehow we need it or discover a need for it and then suddenly we have: the internet, email, ’social media’, X future thing etc.

I think too that focusing on the need (or created need) behind the technology offers important clues. Why do we sue or need social media? Why is it currently so novel to some people? The phone was novel at one point.

The paradigms and models we’re currently using - from operating system file systems up - all stem from personal computing’s origins, when network and communication technologies were expensive and everything was stand-alone. The rise of the consumer Internet means that this model makes less and less sense, and as network technology improves, this will continue. You can bet that all the big name players are looking at how social tech affects not just the end-user apps we use, but the back-end stacks as well.

I think Ed is flat-out 100% wrong: social technologies will lead to a defragmentation of society. The upshot of this transition will be a world where information can be shared and discovered more easily. The danger is that user control must be kept at the centre: we need to decide exactly who gets to see our information, and when and how this happens.