The Web in ‘08

Last week on Twitter, I asked people what they thought would be next year’s hot topic on the internet.

2005 was the year of the blog, 2006 that of social networking and 2007 that of microblogging. 2008 will be that of?

My own reply was quite straightforward and perhaps not unsurprising: video. But that may be putting things too simply – a consequence in part of the 140 character limit perhaps.

I discussed this with Hrafn Thórisson of Think Artificial – my favourite blog regarding all things futuristic & scientific – and suggested we do a small prediction post together. You can read his – no doubt better – part of the tandem post here.

So, video then. I suppose we all know that already. Video’s been hot since YouTube, it’s all around us already, and it’s not going to go away until we get those 3D holograms we’ve been promised. What I think will be 2008’s big hit, however, will be video as an ever more important mobile micromedia tool.

The signs are everywhere. Just think of Ustream, Kyte.tv, Seesmic, and Utterz. All video sites that let you do remarkable stuff: put up your own video – short, quick and dirty: Twitter-style – and share it with the rest of the world instantaneously. Utterz is a service to look out for I think: it lets you post not to a platform of their own (like Kyte does) but to your own medium of choice – say, your blog. Read my earlier post for more on that.

Of course, this isn’t new, not really revolutionary. If you check out my other post you’ll see I had to revert to YouTube in the end and that worked just as well.

But there’s more.

We often think of video as Comic Book Guy staring into his webcam talking drivel. But with video going increasingly mobile and on-the-fly, it doesn’t have to be that way. Mobile phones have browsers, right? And browsers have access to the web. It’s not impossible then that by this time next year a colleague is recording a video, editing it with Jing v.2 on their phone, and uploading it to their blog, including captions, callouts and real-time PIP streaming of the presentation they’re giving by then, pulled live from the convention centre network they’re at.

Of course, the video will have tags, a time line and hyperlinks. That are searchable. Within minutes the video post will have been picked up by Google’s Video Search. That’s when I’m alerted of this and reply from the plane I’m on. My vid is immediately broadcasts to the auditorium audience.

Well, obviously things won’t happen that quickly. Moreover, it’ll be a while before anything like it will be widely adopted at all – even on a smaller, more personal scale. People like their privacy, which even with Twitter and Tumblr all over the place is still preserved to a large extent. It’s one thing sending a last tweet before bedtime, doing that on video is another. And you can’t have video tweets (veeds?) on at work all day.

But then yesterday I got a video e-mail from a company presenting a new weekly video newsletter they’ll be sending out. And I’m sure, as soon as the right service comes along, we’ll be doing the same on a regular basis. Perhaps not all videos of us talking and bashing the Kindle, but at least illustrating what we’re writing about. Video tumbling. Video twittergrams.

That’s what I see as achievable in a year’s time. Not futuristic, but fascinating nonetheless, and we’ll all give in some time sooner or later, in some form or other.

With this, we’ll be one step closer again to the true Ubiquitous Permeating Internet (UPI). What that is? No idea. I thought of it a couple days ago and it sounded cool.

UPI… I like it. It’s going to be the hot topic for 2009 I’m sure.

Tags: 2008, future, mobile, UPI, Video