But where is the web going? In order to answer this, Thomas Baekdal produced the following diagram:

This graph accompanies an excellent article on Baekdal’s blog entitled “Where is Everyone?” It shows that over time all methods of information exchange have a natural lifespan: they’re born, they enjoy explosive growth and then they wane and eventually they are supplanted by the next innovation. What’s interesting to notes is how many more innovations there are and how much shorter their lifespans are.

If we focus on the portion of the graph that relates to the present we see that magazines and newspapers are dying of and the influence of television is declining.

Baekdal sees blogs and websites going into decline. This is an idea echoed by Steve Rubel who argues that creating blog posts is too time consuming for most people. Instead platforms like Twitter and Facebook offer the ability to create snippets of information and opinion that are long enough to be useful but not time consuming to create. The web of tomorrow is a ‘statusverse’ that includes links, opinions and images – all hacked into bite-sized chunks that can be rapidly digested as ‘streams’.

A good example of this is Flickr. Photos can be uploaded, tagged, shared, commented on and even syndicated for us on blogs or as stock photography. A photograph in a Flickr photostream is a lot more versatile and widely seen than the ones gathering dust in our parent’s attics.

Streams of information can be organized by interest, by people or by topic and are constantly changing and growing (unlike the static web sites of yesterday). What’s interesting here is that the streams can be viewed via a browser but they don’t have to be. iPhone apps that communicate directly with Facebook or desktop apps like TweetDeck bypass the browser all together. Increasingly we will see more of this type of interactions as Adobe AIR matures and more of these activities enter the mainstream behind Twitter.

“Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.” Jeremiah Owyang

The report puts a few pieces of information together to conclude that Twitter could “couple e-commerce with advice from other shoppers, an element that most search engines do not offer.”

In other words, combining what Twitter users already do – ask their followers for product recommendations – with a proprietary Twitter product search and payment system. Adding fuel to this idea is Twitter board member Todd Chaffee, who tells The Times that “As people use Twitter to get trusted recommendations from friends and followers on what to buy, e-commerce navigation and payments will certainly play a role in Twitter monetization.”

“There is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.” How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live – TIME