OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

Like

Unlike