10 Interesting Future Web Trends; SFP08, anyone?

Journalists loves lists, and they can be fun to read, but this doesn't have much value for people trying to predict the future. Let us not forget the oft-quoted words of His Eminence Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

The fact is that web 3.0 (shudders in self-loathing at having used the term) doesn't exist yet. If you could see the future, it would be blank. In 1998, web search wasn't the future. Google made it the future. If we don't already know what the future holds, it's no use predicting it--it won't exist until a company comes along and tells us what it is. For the more ambitious among us, that's the role we're looking to play when we start a company--not to predict the future, but to define it.

I'm excited for this one, but it takes millions of dollars in equipment costs to do it today. You can cheaply test for a million basepair subset of someone's genome right now with the right machines at 92% accuracy, which means you really test for the same 100,000 basepair subset ten times to get great accuracy. The full genome is way out of reach today, but hopefully not in five years.

9. Personalized Medicine; this has been on the cards for some time, but in the not too distant future our medical details will be online and the networking aspects of the Internet will be utilized to improve the way medicine is prescribed. As a recent report noted: "Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases." See also the blog ScienceRoll.