What the Internet Will Look Like in 5 Years
What the Internet will look like in 5 years (and what lawyers should do now to prepare)
Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently gave his predictions about what the Web will look like in 5 years. Because of the venue much of the conversation revolved around enterprise solutions, but around the 23 minute mark he discusses the Internet in general.
ReadWriteWeb.com has written up some good highlights:
- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
- “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
- “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
- “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
Two of his predictions stand out as being particularly important for lawyer marketing:
- Search engines are making real-time content a priority, so it’s time get involved with social media, because aside from being in the news, I don’t see how else a lawyer can use real-time content to his or her advantage. Google and Bing’s deals with Twitter confirm that search engines are looking toward social media as a primary source of real-time content. The merging of search and social media is certainly not the only reason to get involved with social media, but it makes for a nice bonus.
- People will listen to other people more than traditional sources (which is already happening), so it’s going to be increasingly important for lawyers to embrace client/peer reviews. It’s also going to be important for lawyer-rating entities to incorporate open and honest review systems if they want to remain relevant.
