I love this kind of thinking. Robert has given some thought to what’s going on today and what should make this evolution of the web at 2010 happen. I believe that he’s got a lot of great insights here. Want to see the list?

Here’s what Robert says will be indicative of the 2010 web:

1. Real Time. Google caught the Wave of that trend today BIG TIME.
2. Mobile. Google, again, caught that wave big time Wednesday when it handed Android phones to everyone at its IO conference.
3. Decentralized. Does Microsoft or Twitter demonstrate that trend? Not really well.
4. Pre-made blocks. I call this “copy-and-paste” programming. Google nailed it with its Web Elements (I’ll add a few of those next week).
5. Social. Oh, have you noticed how much more social the web is? The next two days I’m hanging out on an aircraft carrier with a few people who do social media for the Navy.
6. Smart. Wolfram Alpha opened a lot of people’s eyes to what is possible in new smart displays of information.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. At the Twitter Conference this week lots of people were talking about how they were using both traditional servers along with cloud-based approaches from Amazon and Rackspace to store, study, and process the sizeable datasets that are coming through Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.

What do you think? I think this is Scoble’s next book. You?

The web gave us the perfect “nowhere.” A Star Trek fan in Houlton, Maine can talk with another fan from Reykjavík, Iceland, without thinking a thing about it. We can be anywhere, and if you follow through, anywhen, and thus, we don’t need proximity to build relationships (or customers, or much of anything). The first web, the brochure web, gave way to the second web, the two-way web. What if the third web is about the relationship of things and places between the physical world and the placeless, timeless world? I’m calling this vplaces (more in a bit).

Our web has already shifted. Bridges tell us when they are up and down. Laundry rooms report their status. The web of things now connects the physical world with the web world. Here’s where my thinking started getting into something else.

vplaces, pplaces, and tplaces

The web of nowhere relates to vplaces. You might be thinking Second Life. I’m not. Well, okay. Second Life can be part of it. But the web of nowhere is the web we have today. I can write this blog post anywhere in the world (Seattle, Boston, Fresno). You can read it anywhere (Mumbai, Glasgow, Detroit). It’s the web of “it doesn’t matter where things are.”

The web of nowhere is not necessarily real time, either. Blogs and plenty of websites Thus, the web of nowhen is also the non-realtime. As we’re starting to become more and more interested in realtime, with tools like FriendFeed and other lifestreaming devices and applications, there’s also more and more pull for the time-shifted web, or tplaces.

What do I mean? Phone calls are synchronous. The real-time web is synchronous. Events and real space activities are synchronous. But there’s value in time-displaced events, too. For instance, if I mix a combo of physical world places (pplaces) and timeshifted information (tplaces), I get services like BrightKite, where I can leave notes in the air in a place for someone to come along and find them.

What other combos are there? If you mix vplaces and pplaces, there are many opportunities. Think about all the various Apple iPhone apps that use GPS as one component, like NIN Access. Think about Microsoft Tag. Think about situations where the web doesn’t have to be a static page any more. Think about a web that comes together are things, around objects talking to each other and us, around places that are a mix of physical and otherwise.

What Am I Ranting About?

I admit this doesn’t have immediate and obvious application, and yet it does. To me, it does. I see this as clearly as anything. To me, if you design for the web of today, you’ll get what everyone else has. If you start planning for these new webs, of places, of timeshifting, of mapping the physical into the web and back again, you’ll start to find the new vectors, the new possibilities.

What does this say to you? Anything? Did your eyes light up?

It dawns on me that this is a missed opportunity in several ways.

1. Links are love. If I link to them, Google values that link and helps search traffic find the site.
2. Links encourage exploration. You click links on my site all the time. I watch you do it.
3. Web presence gives us a public glimpse of you. It gives people backstory.
4. Web presence provides you more opportunities to meet new people.
5. Web presence makes a larger showing of your company’s thinkers.

Not every employee needs a blog, and not every employee should be outward facing from a web perspective (several might not want that, actually). But the folks who have jobs that put them in contact with people like me? I think you need a web presence, please.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Links Signify Intention

This relates to what Steve Gillmor talks about with regards to gestures and attention and the like. If I put a link in a blog post, it suggests that I find value in what lies at the other end of the link. It means that I think YOU should click the link and see what’s going on.

So think about that for a moment. Think about YOUR behavior with links. When you write about Britt Raybould’s Bold Words blog, but you DON’T put links, you’re signifying that you’re not interested in people following the link to discover her work ( link to Britt’s great blog, btw). When you talk about LinkedIN, but you link it back to your own blog post instead of to LinkedIN, you’re signifying that you want to keep traffic on your site. SOMETIMES, this makes sense. If I said, “here’s my other article about LinkedIN,” then that makes sense. But if EVERY link keeps the audience on your site, you’re telling me that you don’t want me wandering around the web sharing attention.

Links Build Networks of Thought

Years ago, when I got the first ever Mac, it came with HyperCard. It was SO amazing to me. I could link up words inside of text, and give you all kinds of nuance and reference and sidebar conversations, all the while keeping the original document in-line. Links are part of that same magic, only better. Because HyperCard, at least when I was starting out with it, was relegated to referencing my own computer and documents, whereas links let me point all over the web.

To that end, you can build amazing and interesting networks of thought. You can build posts that give people an understanding about something by synthesizing data FOR them. Sometimes, you’re not the authority, but you are always in a position to thread up some articles, videos, and other resources to build out something of use to you. Being helpful means finding the right resources for the point you’re hoping to make.

Links Give Credit

If you click the photo included in this blog post, it takes you back to the artist who created it. Though it’s not a “perfect” way to give credit ( Steve Garfield schools me on this all the time), it’s better than just using their picture in my blog post, and better than just writing that “Jared” did this work.

In this world of free, one of the ONLY currencies we still seek and demand are links. If you note, my work is all available to you for free, to repurpose in lots of ways. The only thing you can’t legally do with my work is directly make money from it. (Mind you, if my ideas help you make money because you EXECUTE on them yourselves, you get to keep that with my blessings). But you could repost every single blog post I put up here on your blog, on your dog’s blog, wherever you want, provided you give a link back to me here at [chrisbrogan.com]. That’s not asking a lot in return for all that I put into my work. Right?

So, links are a very important piece of Internet currency. They are the money of attention in that way.

Links ARE the Network

Your phone has plenty of buttons on it, but until you push them in the right order, it’s a lot of capacity and not enough intent. Building web pages like blogs and wikis and the like are YOUR chance to build a network of your own intentions. We do this all the time. FriendFeed is a tool to show you links to all my web presence. So is Lijit. Twitter, blogs, everywhere that we can input html, are ways to thread the needle.

When you add links to a page, you tell a story. You build networks of value. For example, if you build a blog post called “The top 20 Torrent Sites,” you’ve just given someone a resource to improve their web experience.

Go forth. Create networks. Learn how to make nice, beautiful, useful links, give people credit and signal your intentions, and thread a beautiful net for people who can use your help.

The return value is how this all ends up working for us. Doc Searls might call this a way to make because of value from what we’re doing. Do you agree?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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Photo Credit,

Just stop. Stop building the simple stuff. If someone’s done it and it works well, use that part, and add VALUE on TOP of that.

Just a rant as I had to find directions to a place.