Following on from my previous piece I have just viewed a couple of interesting videos projecting how the web may develop in the future courtesy of Richard MacManus.

Whilst there is a certain amount of PR spin and product placement going on here they are both worth a look at if you have a spare 15 minutes. As i noted previously it is reminiscent of the 1920s and the media battle that took place from there on. Same stuff, different technology?

You can catch them here

Where would we be without the internet? Could we live without Google for a day even? Well they tried that and found there are plenty of other engines out there worth looking at. But the real question for me was not whether we could live without Google for a day but whether Google is still the future of the internet.

This is a more challenging question. As Branton Kenton-Dau, my colleague over at VortexDNA, notes the internet is a self organising system constantly feeding off the energy provided by creators and imaginators. So far Google has kept this energy focused through itself by either developing new services or simply buying in what they like.

There is no problem with big…..big can be good but big requires a lot more energy to self-sustain. The beauty of the web is that it reflects demands so quickly. It is essentially democratic in its processing, beautiful and free…well not quite. It has the capacity to be controlled and regulated which we have seen all too frequently.

But i have a feeling that the internet as we know it may reorganise itself by deconstructing and coming back to life in a different form. This may well be opposite to what we have now where we go out to look for things. In the next stage of development things will come looking for us. We will be the filter for our web and we will be the center of it.

There will be no more ranking only relevance decided by us. We will configure the web to ourselves with no one interfering with or controlling what we see. I’m excited about this vision because it offers so much.

How we get there is anyone’s guess but that’s the beauty of systems.