The Future of the Web - Kevin Kelly

5000 days - that is about 13.75 years. It is amazing how much has changed in that amount of time. It was a big deal when I was a senior in college (the 1st time around) and my college was the first to require the incoming freshman to buy a computer. (And it wasn’t a stylish laptop by any stretch of the imagination.) Any computers on campus or in dorm rooms were used to do homework and projects. There weren’t any thoughts of connecting to the web. Now we can connect to the web with not only our computers, but with our phones and music players!

The idea of the web being a single global machine and that my computer is a window into it was very interesting. It is hard to think of the web as a machine, because it is so large and has so many pieces. But it is a machine that connects everyone that is connected to the web. It is overwhelming to think about.

Where will the web go in the next 5000 days? Mr. Kelly believes that total personalization will require total transparency. It is the price we will have to pay to have all the bits live on the web. At first this sounds like a personal security nightmare. How do we protect our identity, our credit card numbers, etc? But 5000 days ago, who would have predicted online banking and eBay? We all do that without giving it a second thought. So if total transparency is required, I believe ways will be found to insure that our identities will be protected.

I’m not sure how all of this will affect web design. It seems like the w3c is trying to come up with standards, but it can’t keep up with the fast paced changing technologies. One thing I am sure of, there will be more hand held devices used to view the web in the future. Web designers will have to make sure that their sites work on these platforms.