Tonight I give you a peak into what I think the next level phase of the internet will be. But first I will re-cap where we currently are.
1. Almost everyone and there mother has access to the internet.
2. Everyone uses some sort of instant message client to conversate with friends.
3. Most people have some sort of social page, (myspace, vox, facebook).
What does this mean, it means that people are becoming comfortable with the internet, and using it to communicate with people. What is the problem with the current state of the internet? It replaces life instead of enhances it. People spend hours upon hours searching through myspace and other social websites. Why do they spend tons of time searching through these social sites? Because alot of the information does not interest them. This same phenomenon happens on the social news site digg.com. The community is huge, but this creates a problem for niche markets. I am not saying digg is flawed, on the contray it is very good at what it does. The flaw is that the community is decided, and the community is not the community I want to be apart of. So now I have the task of finding my own digg. There are other options out there like reddit.com, which I may end up switching too, if my personal attempt at the concept does not take off. However what site I choose is not important. What is important is finding the community I want to be apart of. And there in lies the next phase of the internet.
The next phase is not about masses of people using the same site, it will be about niche communities with similar interest working together to find the information and news they are interested in. This will probably extend in multiple directions. The obvious ones are areas of interest, for instance types of music, hunint enthusiasts and such. And I am not talking about a forum, but a social enginge designed to help each market enhance there outside life. Some other areas I could possibly see would be local communities. Right now geeks are the man group of people who have local user groups like orug, but I believe this will extend to the above categories. Music would be the obvious choice. A social enginge designed to help people connect with the local emo/rock/dance/pop music scene. Myspace on a smaller more local scale.
I am sure this is not the best written blog post but is where my money is on the internet.