In a thought-provoking blog post Robert Scoble, once the famed “Microsoft blogger” and now working on a new project for Rackspace called Building 43, tries to look forward to what the web will be like next year.

He says he has some thoughts on its characteristics:

1. It’s real time. (“Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend.”)
2. It’s mobile.
3. It’s decentralized. (“Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.”)
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. (“You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages.”)
5. It’s social. (“This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.”)
6. It’s smart. (“We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.”)
7. Hybrid infrastructure. (“When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular.”)

Interesting stuff…

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