Futurity Media

Sometimes we get the opportunity to stand back from our most pressing work commitments, and gaze across the technology landscape at the changing Internet. We are frequently told that social media is a work in progress, and is still its infant phase. So let us ponder where it may go in the coming years. What follows is idle future pondering, scenarios almost. Please do not take the following as a forecast.

Twitter will not last without a radical reinvention

The increasing openness between networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – will increase. Status updates on one will be seamlessly available to all, and also embedded in Microsoft Office applications, in collaboration tools, with SMS and so on. Status will be your thoughts, your retweets and @’s and also your car’s GPS location, and your appliances’ status (you’re washing machine will let you know when the cycle is complete). In fact the ability to display status updates will be as common a function as voice: completely commoditised.

Imagine a future Facebook interface which selects your real friends, the people you have interacted with on Twitter (or the like), or that have used common hashtags. Powerful algorithms will serve up only the status and conversations you are likely to find interesting. So what value in having an army of followers that is not listening to you? Will those that are currently trying to greedily acquire social capital now find their efforts were in vain?

I believe the effect of this evolution in social media interfaces (not the networks behind them) will help to cut down a lot of the noise.  In terms of which social media applications will dominate, the winning environment will be the one with the best usability and the best distribution because being a walled garden isn’t going to last.

Junk content will get worse before it gets better

Ever wonder what happens when you pay “writers” $1 for a 1000 word? It ends up as a How-To article on websites funded by Google Adsense revenues.  Many (not all) of these sites operate without any accountability whatsoever. What’s wrong with this? People are paid a pittance to plagiarise, cut corners or simply write with fake authority about subjects they know absolutely nothing about. Hundreds of millions of pages of junk content is clogging up Google. While bedroom publishers can build an economic model based on Adsense, don’t expect any self restraint.

This is not to say that How-To sites are the only ones manipulating or exploiting dubious online content to gain Adsense revenue. There are many technology sites doing this also, grabbing articles about popular brands and scurrilously twisting the meaning into something sensational. The best of the Adsense-funded sites are enthusiasts with not enough time to check facts; the worst simply don’t care at all about veracity. Their only interest is traffic because now they have a direct correlation between views and cents.

Eventually we will stop reading and the noise will quieten down

Looking further ahead – 10 years for instance – and the verbal diarrhoea generated by UGC and copy factories will be on the wane. As more and more of the content we will view becomes video, audio and spoken-word menus, our reliance on scanning stories for what we want to know will dissipate. Natural language-based search (sometimes called the semantic web) will make it easier for us to go direct to the information we want. Intelligent agents will learn our habits and interests and will interoperate with these search tools to ensure that each search is really, really targeted. And the widespread deployment of touchscreen interfaces – in work PCs, the living room TV, in-car computer and the home control panel – will gradually break our century-old connection to the keyboard. Intelligent speech, search, profiling and interfaces could combine to end the rule of the Word on the Internet

So which of these scenarios could come true? What other futures for media/social media can you envision?