Here is a list of scenarios and technologies that will shape the Internet’s future. Some are already available and a few we’d like to look forward to in the near future:

1>  Niche Club

While Myspace and Facebook may have introduced the world to social networking, it is evolving quickly. There is new web-based software coming out (such as channelme.tv) that can turn just about any blog into a social networking site.

2> Iphone and geography tracking

The days of telling your parent that you are going to the movies when you are really going to a party are over. Not only can your parents track your geographic location, but just about everyone else can too.

3> Streaming Live Video

Sites like www.ustream.tv allow anyone with a $20 webcam to host their own show. In the past, if you missed your favorite television show, you pretty much had to depend on your friends to inform you of what happened. Not anymore! In fact, many shows now stream new episodes at the same time, or very quickly after the show has aired.

4>  Social lending

Now, getting a personal loan is easier than ever. Peer to Peer Lenders like Lending Club can get you a 25K personal loan funded by individuals across the USA. You still have to fill out personal information, but the stacks of paperwork that we were all accustomed to are now ancient history.

5> Online Elections

While this idea hasn’t quite caught on yet, just think of the possibilities. If we can do everything from purchasing movie tickets to paying our bills online, why can’t we vote online as well?

6> Mobile Profiles

With GPS, WiFI and iphone like devices it isn’t hard to imagine one day walking into a bar and being able to scroll through the profiles of everyone who comes within certain proximity to you.

7> Universal Connectivity

You may have a hard time trying to keep track of all of your usernames and password. In the near future, sites like  www.openid.com are coming close to safely allowing users to only need one username and one password for everything. These accounts will link all of your various networks in one place. This is welcome news to people all over the world, who have trouble remembering birthdays, let alone what username goes with what password.

Source: theFuturesocial.com

The current explosion of social networking will soon result in most websites having a social networking component.  As a result the big step in social networking isn’t going to be who creates the next MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube, but who creates a website or software to consolidate all the data that all these networks produce.

Flock is a browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Flock creator call it “the social browser” as it enhanced multiple automations for social networking and web 2.0 services like Flickr, Blogger, Twitter etc. Flock comes with a built-in RSS aggregator for keeping an eye on your favorite feeds and works with almost any of Firefox add-ons.

Flock automatically activates these services within its features:

• Flock can indicate when friends have updated their profile, uploaded photos or other things.
• Flock has internal features that allow sharing of text, links, photos and videos.
• Flock has its own system allowing preview of online videos and photos, and subscription to video feeds.
• Flock’s Feed Reader organizes Atom and RSS feeds.
• Flock’s Blog Editor allows direct posting into a designated blog, along with being a blog reader.
• Flock also allows for third-party add-ons, including a number of Firefox extensions

The 10MB download picks up bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings from your existing installation of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Public beta (one) of Flock 2 is fast, manages memory better, and is more secure.

Source: Wikipedia

The world’s top cellphone maker, Nokia, has agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services. Plazes provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record and share their social activities. Nokia did not disclose the value of the deal.

Plazes, based in Berlin, Germany is a service that lets you share your location and leave a brief message — akin to Twitter — about what you’re doing. Your message is placed on a map. In other words, it’s like Twitter, only with the added feature of location tags. Plazes’ most recent version actually integrates Twitter into its service entirely.

Plazes builds a grid of locations using databases and namespaces for locations. Its users have already built a database of hundreds of thousands of locations.

“This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy,” Niklas Savander, the head of Nokia’s Internet services, said in a statement.

To achieve new growth as the cellphone business is set to mature in coming years Nokia started to invest heavily in building up its presence in Internet service.

The Plazes acquisition also follows by nearly two years Nokia’s pickup of another Berlin-based company, Gate5, which has a strong background in wireless mapping, routing, and navigation software.

Source: ITWeb

The popular news aggregator Reddit has gone open source. The Reddit source code is available now and is written largely in Python. The Reddit development site is available at http://code.reddit.com. Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain the documentation wiki.

“Reddit announcement can be interpreted in two ways. One is that they are letting developers look inside the engine and add value-add code. Stuff like widget, trackers, analytics plugins etc come to mind immediately.

Second motivation, important one, is to let publishers run their own news voting site. This may appeal to many big news organizations who have passive distrust with Digg like rating sites. News rating engines are prone to manipulation. Digg is famous for it’s community activism. Also there are organized (Digg-gangs) attempts to game the system. This is where Reddit’s open source card (CPAL license is a open source play NOT AN OPEN SOURCE CODE) can be very interesting,” says the Blog onemoreidea.

It’s been known for some time that Reddit was (re)built using Pylons and Mako templates. As it turns out, they’ve also built something of their own database layer, which seems to include a homegrown caching layer and ultimately is built on top of SQLAlchemy, using the SQLA expression language to generate queries. Connections are served with the QueuePool, and they use the threadlocal setting, so that they can get implicit access to transactions in progress. They vertically partition their database access among four separate engines across four distinct areas of functionality on the site.

Since the site is mainly run by the users, the new approach will give the user more power to help in the development of Reddit.com. Also, Reddit has always been one of the most transparent social media communities and yet they still want to be more transparent.

Source: techspot.zzzeek.org

It would be the largest scale relaunch of a website of its size. MySpace, the social networking site, will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities. Other changes will come during the summer.

“This is more than a face-lift; we’re changing the way people interact with the site and with brands,” MySpace said.

The site’s search engine will get a face-lift. MySpace will use the Java-based Apache Lucene text search engine library, marking the first time MySpace has officially contributed to the open-source community, the company said. MySpace joined Google’s OpenSocial platform in November.

On the MySpaceTV front, the site will add a scrubber, time stamp, volume memory, updated menu system, and greater functionality to its new player. The player, which will use Flash 9, will initially be released on all of MySpaceTV.com, with embedding capability to follow shortly thereafter.

MySpace is routinely criticized by users and observers for a layout that many consider visually messy. Its members have many options to alter their profile pages, such as changing their background color, adding hyperactive animations, using fonts of many sizes and colors and plastering them with videos and photo slideshows.

Source: PCMag

There is a Web of projection that recently built up around the public debut of Facebook, Silicon Valley’s hottest Internet company. Although, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder denied this in an interview with CBS’s 60 minutes, but,that hasn’t stopped bloggers and investors from interpreting Facebook’s every move as preparation for an eventual public offering.

“Social media is going to be mainstream, it’s going to be ubiquitous,” said Mayfield Fund managing director Navin Chaddha at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms summit this week.

Venture capitalists say the excitement around Facebook is warranted given the explosive growth in membership. The social network has more than tripled the number of active members to 70 million from about 20 million in April 2007. They also said that they’ve asked start-ups they fund to shore up cash for the next year or so, until the public markets open their wallets for their debuts.

Despite the incredible traffic that Facebook continues to generate, the company is still in the process of determining just how to translate all the online traffic into actual dollars; 2007 revenue is reported to be $150 million. Although Facebook collected $300 million from Microsoft (MSFT) recently, they will need additional funding. An IPO is most likely the route they will take to acquire additional funding.

Source: Reuters

Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. The new tool is going to compete with data portability crowd like Facebook Connect from Facebook or Data Availability from MySpace.

Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties), ” said TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Although, Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet.

Source: TechCrunch