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 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

Videos shared on YouTube and blogs scrutinizing candidates are part of an Internet-age revolution shaking up the US presidential election and sweeping in a new political era. The role of the Internet and new media is becoming more important in election results as the Internet penetration rate increases.

Obama’s official Web site is twice as popular as Clinton’s. The results seem similar to the primary results now. It means the Alexa Ratings are reflecting the real people’s votes and the higher place is not just because of Internet marketting.

The rise of blogging and voter-posted videos also holds danger for candidates, whose every comment and move can be captured and shared online by anyone with a camera phone and basic Internet skills.

Bittergate refers to a controversy Obama was mired in after he referred to small town Pennsylvania residents as “bitter” people who “cling to guns and religion” during a private fundraising event in San Francisco.

Clinton’s campaign took a hit when the same blogger posted audio recording of her ex-president husband, Bill Clinton, calling a magazine reporter a “scumbag” for writing an unflattering story about him.

“The political establishment and mainstream press are only beginning to catch up with a new generation of political players who are creating powerful new ways for ordinary citizens to get involved,” said Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum devoted to exploring how technology is changing politics.

Source: Yahoo News

As per IDC report, Internet advertising will grow about 3.5 times as fast as advertising overall over the next five years. IDC also said the Internet in US will go from the No. 5 advertising medium all the way to No. 2 in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.

From now until 2012, Internet advertising will grow about three-and-a-half times as fast as advertising at large, and IDC said it thinks overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012.

Search advertising will continue to generate the most revenue over the forecast period in the United States, IDC said. This means that for any media company, search must remain a key part of its strategy for attracting ad dollars, despite Google’s current dominance of the market, the analyst firm said. Google has about a 70% share of the search advertising market.

“What will also drive this trend is that consumers are starting to realize that, as opposed to TV, Internet video lets them watch what they want, when they want, and increasingly also where they want,” Karsten Weide, IDC’s program director for digital media and entertainment, said in a statement.

With highly optimistic reports like these about the expected continued growth in online ad spending, the sense of urgency likely grows among companies like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, all of which have so far failed to capitalize as much their investors and executives have expected on online advertising’s growth in recent years.

Source: InformationWeek

Sun’s Chief Executive, Rich Green hailed JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment at its JavaOne conference. This tool is all set to compete with Adobe Systems’ AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. He showed a JavaFX application with Flickr and Twitter feeds running in Facebook within the browser, and then he dragged it out of the browser–to the desktop. The same application also was shown running on a Java-enabled phone via JavaFX Mobile.

Sun wants to expand the way Java plays on the Web by adding a scripting language, JavaFX. Scripting languages tend to be easier to use than full-bore C#, C++, or Java. Languages such as Ruby, Perl, Python, and PHP have gained currency in Web applications because they are easy to apply in user interfaces and easy to change. JavaFX is another such language and compiles its simple scripting code to the same byte code that Java does. Consequently, JavaFX can run in the Java Virtual Machine anywhere Java does, including on smartphones, PCs, and servers.

Sun is hoping to tap into 2.2 billion mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop PCs that are Java-enabled. JavaFX was shown running on Google’s Android mobile platform. Green noted that 85 percent of cell phones, 91 percent of desktops, and 100 percent of all Blu-ray Disc players will run JavaFX.

Sun set forth a road map for JavaFX:

* In July, Sun will open the JavaFX Desktop SDK Early Access Program
* In the fall, JavaFX Desktop 1.0 ships.
* In the spring of 2009, the JavaFX Mobile and TV 1.0 variants will ship.

Source: InformationWeek

Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding ). Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month. The site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.

The following chart shows that the growth is slow but steady with an acceleration in the last few weeks.

I looked at Hitwise clickstream data and it appears that Twitter is getting into speed in terms of user base. Since, there are too many access points for Twitter( Mobile Phone etc), it is difficult to measure its size. The website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service didn’t reach yet significantly in the mainstream user. The site’s top sources of traffic last week were Social Networks and Forums, Email Services and Search Engines. As per digitalmediawire, 71% of visits from Search Engines are from new users compared to 33% and 38% respectively for Social Networks and Email Services.

Whilst Twitter continues to be an interesting website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. Clickstream data helps us understand that this growth is both from new users and repeat visitors.

Source: Hitwise

Internet users are quite familiar with the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), a quick method that verifies whether or not the user trying to sign up is a person or a bot. Coming on the heels of credible accounts of the downfall of first Yahoo’s and then Gmail’s CAPTCHA, Ars Technica is reporting on Websense Security Labs’ deconstruction of the cracking and tuning / exploitation of the Live Hotmail CAPTCHA.

Ars calculates that a single zombie computer can sign up over 1400 Live Hotmail accounts in a day, and alternate account creation with spamming. To make matters worse, Websense Security Labs is now reporting that the method for getting around Windows Live Mail’s CAPTCHA has been improved to the point that a bot can decipher the text and make a guess in less than six seconds, on average. Windows Live Hotmail’s Anti-CAPTCHA automatic bot, which hooks itself into Internet Explorer on a victim’s machine, has a success rate of about 10-15 percent. That means that it takes up to one minute for a single bot to create a new account.

Hopefully a workable solution can be found that doesn’t make troublesome demands on the sincere user. Finding, testing, and implementing a CAPTCHA alternative will of course take time.

Source: Ars Technica

According to the latest report published by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have looked for information through Google or other search engine. That is more than twice the 22 percent of users in 2002. Also it appears majority are Googling their neighbors. The study says:

Americans under 50 and those with more education and income were more likely to self-Google — in some cases because their jobs demand a certain online persona.

Interestingly most of the users are not concerned about their personal information on line despite growing concern about data protection. This would unfortunately  be good news for phishers and online scammers.

The review found that 53 percent of adult Internet users admit to looking up information about friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbors. This is great! Not only you will have to worry about your neighbors telescope pointing at your bedroom, you will now have to worry about them looking at your MySpace profile too!

The study also highlights the fact that women were slightly more likely to look up information compared to men about someone they are dating.

The telephone survey of 1,623 Internet users was conducted between Nov. 30 and December 30 last year.  Source: C-Net

I think the size of the survey is too small to be of  scientific value. However it still validates the market for web based services targeted to US adult population.