Six Important Trends for the Connected World We Live In

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly gave the first keynote of the day. His topic? The six trends he believes are most important for the connected world we live in going forward. Specifically, he broke these down into six verbs.

“In general these are the long term trends as we look forward over the next twenty years,” Kelly says. So what are they?

• Screening — Kelly notes that whereas there used to be just the television screen and then the computer screen, now screens are everywhere. And increasingly, everything will be a screen — all surface. There will be a “one screen for all,” Kelly says.
• Interacting — Right now, interaction is limited mainly to our fingertips, Kelly says. But the iPad is changing that — it’s about using more of your body now. And going forward, things like gestures, voice, cameras, and other things in our technology will transform the way we interact with everything. And yes, he brought up Minority Report.
• Sharing — While most people think of this right now as the top level social ideas, “we’ve just begun this process,” Kelly notes. The self-tracking of everything we do is now coming into play, he notes. This includes location, realtime pictures and videos, etc.
• Flowing — “We’re now into a new metaphor for the web,” Kelly says noting that we started with the desktop on computers, then pages for the web. Now the realtime stream connected to the web is the thing.
• Accessing — We’re moving to a world where it’s about accessing information and media and not owning it. We see this now with the rise of Netflix, but soon that will fully hit the music space too.
• Generating — “The Internet is the world’s largest copy machine,” Kelly says. Going forward, there will be an importance placed on things that cannot be easily copied. A key to this is an easy way to pay and content that is hard to copy. Immediacy is a key — if you want something right now versus when it can be copied. Personalization is another key, he says.

Kelly notes that not all of these things may hit in a major way, but this is how he sees things going right now.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/

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