What will the world come to? Online communities the next decade!

I once read an famous article, I think it was by Arthur C. Clarke, where he predicted the use of satellites orbiting earth. These satellites could be used to transmit radiosignals and other kind of electronic data. He also envisioned letters arriving just hours after they were sent ... by rocketship. He later recalled this prediction and used it as a good metaphor for how difficult it is to predict the future. How could he have known that the satellites in geostationary orbits he described would be just as good way of serving data from a new invention called "the Internet"? I discovered a similar error in a game from the late eighties. Here we had these faster than light spaceships using subspace communication devices - and they send important documents by fax!

I guess the lesson learned is simply that things tend to change in ways we can not imagine, perhaps even fathom. This is probably also the reason why I never get bored with reading about technological developments or new concepts. The sheer vitality of the human mind stimulates my will to live and to explore. I suspect that it is first when you lose this imporant ability to absorb development that you truly grow old.

Anyway - I am using these examples because I believe it is always important to know about both the past and the present. Not to be able to predict the future, but to know what kind of expectations people used to have - and what came to happen. I guess the most important lesson we can learn is that the future seldom turn out the way we expect it to.

And still - here I am - trying to look at how online communities may evolve over the next decade. And in the process I will probably make myself a laughing stock and in a few years be used as an example of how wrong people imagined the future would become. But you know what? I do not really care. Perhaps my predictions - as silly as may sound a few years from now - may give other people some good ideas. If I somehow can contribute to ways to make my ideas silly, well then I could not really ask for anything more.

So where are online communities heading today? IRC is old, forums are yesterdays news, 3D worlds have been around for the last decade or so.

But what we see now is the advent of a new kind of community; a mobile community. We once talked about digital nomads, today this vision is closer to reality than ever. What I guess will happen is that it is not as much the methods we interact with that are going to change - but the reason why we interact for.

Today cellphones have become more or less the de facto way of keeping in touch with friends and family. First through voice conversation, then by SMS/MMS, and then by different kinds of 3rd party applications using positioning services. These positioning services are still not particulary common in most countries, but almost all new high end cellphones comes with this kind of functionality built in, and Google are having software support for similar kind of services using triangulation algorithms. So we are getting there.

Today these services offer the ability to use simple functions as "locate a friend" and "locate friend group". Of course, these kind of location oriented services can also be used to deliver a bunch of other services - but that is material for another blog. But as time goes, new ways of communicating will be invented - and expected. Like the ability to search for people that are happy - or that needs comfort. Or perhaps that are stressed out. Now imagine that this is not based on emoticons or status people are setting manually, but signals read by the mobile phone. For instance by detecting the amount of sweat in the users palms, or by reading information from sensors in the users body. Regarding the last part - yes, this is a very realistic possibility, and no - we are not talking about many years into the future.

Different kind of display devices will be developed as new technologies emerge. I would find it very likely that we are not going to have to handle the constricted boundaries of existing monitors or screens for many more years now. Technologies like headmounted displays or lasers projecting images directly on the retinas will most likely become more commonplace than they are today. Unless of course some new kind of technology does not appear delivering opportunities we can not even dream about today.

But if we follow the first idea, then my guess is that it will only be a matter of time till augmented reality becomes a ... heh ... reality. I strongly recommend reading up on this topic here and of course on Wikipedia. With augmented reality we would for instance be able to interact with virtual representations of other members of the community - as if they were present right in front of you. They could present information, show the direction or other ways of partaking in games and fun.

We could pull this even further - where we see community "spaces" - areas dedicated to social interaction with community members. These virtual areas may become just as important as malls or other real locations are today. Windows and mirrors may turn into portals where you can access information about your fellow community members and the health of the community itself.

And if you look at it this way - perhaps online communities will end up being a kind of extended family. That the social structure we know today may crumble and be replaced by something different.

My last prediction may scare some people, but it is not entirely unlikely. And there exists a number of other cultures today where there does not exist a family structure the way we think of here in the west, but where one is related to a village.

And to take this even further - with this kind of community, the bots would most likely become more and more sophisticated. As online communities perhaps will be integrated as extended family members, maybe virtual community members will be included as well. So a few decades down the road we may end up with virtual family members that are just as important to us as real family members. But this virtual family will always be there for you - and never die.

Does this sound like a nightmare or promise? To be honest, for my own part it sounds like neither. I believe it will be a natural development. People will most likely hardly reflect on how strange this might have been a few decades down the road.

But it is worth noticing that most of the things I mentioned in this blog exists already (interactive windows and mirrors, injectable sensors, headmounted displays, GPS integrated on mobile phones, mobile sensor detecting users health etc.). The technology is there, we just have to think of new ways of using it. Don't worry - I will get back to more such scenarios later on. I promise!

Darn, I just wish the future came faster! I hate living in the past!