What is the future for online technology??

Tell Me The Future:

• Chris De Wolfe is strongly associated with social networking because he is a CEO and is a co-founder of MySpace. He believes that social networking is going to continue on allowing people to "put their lives online" and that this is going to continue to the extent that online and offline worlds will become blurred. He also thinks that the future of social networking will become a lot more personal, portable and collaborative, this increases the demand to make everyone's web experience personal. Wolfe also believes that there is so much that can happen to the future of social networking that at the moment we are merely looking at "the tip of the iceberg for what the social web will look like in the future. The impact of portable hardware will be that there will be social networking relationships with every mobile phone company in the world. Wolfe also expects that half of MySpace's future traffic will come from non-PC users.
• Chad Hurley is involved in video and is a co-founder of Youtube. The goal of his company, Youtube, is to allow every person on the planet to participate in Youtube by making the process of uploading videos onto Youtube a mere phone call. Hurley is a positive determinist because he believes that what is coming to the future of companies like Youtube is positive and will link the world together, "record and share video with a small group or everyone around the world".
• Maurice Levy says that the challenge for advertisers is that, with all media soon being digital and almost any advertising possible, advertising will depend even more on a huge amount of creativity. Also with people not wanting to be interrupted for a commercial break, advertising companies will have to find genuine and honest ways to appeal to the public with the needed creativity. Linear media is swiftly being taken over by Liquid media, prescribed time, for example, the time of a television programme, is now becoming multitasking time. You are now able to move more seamlessly in and out of different settings using Liquid media.
• Norvig draws the parallel between Edison inventing electricity and the development of online technology by noting that when Edison invented electricity, he knew that it would be in demand but didn't foresee that it would evolve into such a wide range of electrical appliances such as iPods and mobile phones. Similarly, information now flows so freely that it will also be changed and improved by unforeseen appliances.
• Despite more and more developing countries gaining full Internet connectivity, penetration to more rural areas are continuously restricted due to the lack of infrastructure. Also, there is a problem that a computer is unaffordable for the average villager in a developing country. Overall progress can be achieved though by installing wireless connections in the developing world. However, this will make it extremely difficult to achieve Economies of Scale, which will limit the development in the coming years. This is evidence of a "digital divide" because it shows how late countries in Africa were in achieving internet connections, only in 1991. Also, this divide is shown by the fact that PC's are normally unaffordable in African households, but in the typical English home, there is at least one available connection to the internet.