New products, Conferences, Books, Papers, Internet of Things

FACEBOOK that looks more like Flickr, and the ”internet of things”, where ovens email you when they need cleaning and socks have microchips so they can find each other: Welcome to social media and the internet in 2020, as predicted by the top boffin at Yahoo!.

As principal research scientist at Yahoo! San Francisco, Elizabeth Churchill’s job is to gaze into the web’s crystal ball. And as one of the keynote speakers at the Web 3.0 and the Future of Social Media Forum in Sydney this week, she’ll be sharing her visions of the future.

”Facebook I think will be a very different look and feel in five years and there will be other platforms that will be competing,” Dr Churchill says.

Part of the problem with Facebook, she says, is that content – photographs, music, documents – comes second. ”It’s not really a content-posting site. Content is there to drive the social interaction. If you try to search for stuff on Facebook it’s very hard to find because content is not the primary object.”

Contrast that with Flickr. Superficially just a photo-posting site, it has the type of flexibility that could well be the prototype of future social media.

”I can go onto Flickr and it can be primarily conversational. Or I can go onto Flickr and it’s primarily a photo-hosting site. Or I can go onto Flickr and it can primarily be a platform for me to show off my photographs, my cake-baking, my knitting or my engineering,” she says. ”I think we’re going to see much more of that kind of open platform for exploration.”

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