Being a follower of the Internet and its technologies, I like to sit back and logically imagine where the technology will take us in a year, five years, and even twenty years down the road.   Here are some very likely possibilities that everyone should keep in mind when building your next website:

Within Five Years
Within five years, the Internet will be available in 90% of all new model cars and 100% of new phones.  In five years, land-line phones will likely cease to exist, or will be carried to your carrier over the Internet from a local station in your area.  But that is just scratching the surface.  In five years, if everything takes place over the Internet and everything major in your life is connected, there is a large security concern along with constant threats of identity theft which means visiting only websites that one would trust would be a necessity.   But compatibility will also be something that will be mandatory.  While the Internet will be available for all vehicles, not many of these vehicles will have a full on keyboard which means your site will have to have an app made for it or be “appified”.  But here is the coolest part:  No longer will you have to download that 20GB MMO you love so much or wait for patch times — all modern MMOs will likely run directly in the browser.

Within Ten Years
Within ten years, those that do not have the Internet will be considered “impoverished”.  The Internet will be available nearly everywhere, Wal-Mart, the Grocery Store, and everywhere you go will likely have a WiFi hot-spot. The Internet itself will likely not run in a “browser” any longer but will be part of the operating systems of all computing devices — ALL apps and documents will likely be downloaded and stored on an off-site server.  You will likely not have to type any longer either.  Simply speaking to your device would render near-perfect input and you would only need to “address” your device to activate this feature.  The Internet itself would be all TLD’s — Goldsborowebdevelopment.com would simply be GoldsboroWebDevelopment and Google.com would simply be Google (yes, I foresee Google in the next ten years).  At this point, people would likely have insurance on their identities if it is not required by the government to carry this type of insurance to get online.

Within Twenty Years
In the next twenty years you will see all I have mentioned so far with one radical addition… Direct brainwave communications.  In twenty years you can bet your bottom dollar that you will be able to plug-in your very cerebral cortex into the Internet and interface at the speed of thought — they are already working on this technology just as they were working on the car-Internet technology over five years ago.  I also believe at this point that it would be possible to physically injure people over the Internet by sending people plugged into the Internet in this manner “stimuli bombs” and whatnot to trigger other medical issues such as epilepsy and seizures. The “web”, itself would be so far evolved, that your entire thought process would be available for all of your friends to see.

Here is to the new and better internet!