What Matters Now is the latest free  e-book from Seth Godin and friends -it’s provocative, insightful, inspiring and just plain powerful!

Download it, read it, live it….just trust me on this…this IS what [...]]]>

What Matters Now is the latest free  e-book from Seth Godin and friends -it’s provocative, insightful, inspiring and just plain powerful!

Download it, read it, live it….just trust me on this…this IS what matters now.

After social networks, what next?

Are social networks [...]]]> PDA, the digital content blog, featured a recent post that highlighted the discussions of a star-studded internet rock star panel who met at Said Business School in Oxford recently to discuss the future of the web. These great technology minds considered some basic, yet tough and far reaching questions including:

After social networks, what next?

Are social networks the internet’s last big development? And how much will they change?

Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal  and was an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn reminded everyone to evaluate first what stage we’re at with social networks and suggested that maybe there is no innovation left any more, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction.

Biz Stone, Twitter’s CEO was quite sure that  for him, Peter’s suggestions were not the case, there was further innovation to come and that using open technology, open platforms that encourage transparency is where we’ll continue to go and that this open exchange of information will create a resounding global impact.

Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and one of the search giant’s first investors, moved discussions to the mobile internet, suggesting quite assuredly that “Combining social and mobile – there is a new wave of opportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle.”

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman observed,  “I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social networks into their life.”

Given that so much information is now being generated through social networks, but we’re just getting started on determining what can be done with it. Oxford lecturer, Dr Kate Blackmon summed up the discussions  in a nutshell in saying that the future was not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.

So, where is the web going? Who can really say for sure. There are  many questions, a few sound predictions, but no clear agreement about exactly where the web is headed. Personally, I’m fine with that, because for me, not knowing and being there to evolve along with it is half the fun. Besides, if these web-savvy minds can’t come to a clear agreement or shared predictions, how can I?

I know one thing though, I’ll be sailing on into the future of the web, clutching tightly to my mobile.

Question of the day:

After social networks, what do you think is next?