Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years

In the future we won't be relying on one sole company to host our online identities.

In the near future, the notion of a single company holding your online identity, photos, and videos will seem quite strange and unnecessary. This, of course, is the monumental goal of Facebook. And they’ve had some success. Not long ago, it was unthinkable to use our real names on the internet, but Facebook has made this commonplace. However, by 2020, neither Facebook nor any other sole entity will be the exclusive host of our digital identities, our photos and videos, or information about our personal relationships.

Identity

Your digital identity is made up of several parts: authentication, identification, and associated information (your stuff). Authentication is your login. You enter a user name and password, and you’re granted access to manage your identification and associated information.

Authentication is one of the more irritating aspects of online life. Creating new accounts and remembering user names and passwords at dozens of sites is a pain. To solve this problem, Facebook has created a portable authentication mechanism called Facebook Login that is now used on thousands of web sites. It allows you to register for and log in to any website that has adopted Facebook Login, simply by using your Facebook credentials.

The key benefit to Facebook of the broad adoption of this technology is that they get to know everywhere you go on the internet. Further, by hosting your identification (your real name, residence, family members, favourite movies, and even vacation plans) they have quite a powerful marketing platform.

In the future, however, a technology similar to OpenID will be standard, ubiquitous, and deeply integrated into everything we do. The devices we use to access the internet will simply require a biometric pass-code such as a thumb print or voice command. We will be instantly logged into all of our favourite websites and online services. Our personal information will be stored ”in the cloud,” on no particular server owned by any particular corporation. Our profile will be linked to our government files, Air Miles, and medical records.

Decentralized Data

Most people's photo and video workflow goes something like this: we take a picture, upload it to our computer, and then, if we want to share it, upload it somewhere else. Sharing can still be done by email but it's much more practical to upload to Facebook. Many of our fancy phones let us upload directly to Facebook, which is often also our camera. The problem is that now there are multiple copies of that photo, and more importantly, one of the copies is sitting on a closed system owned by a corporation.

Accessing your content is also a challenge. On our mobile devices, we can use the Facebook app to see and post some of our pictures, and we can buy music from the iTunes store and download it to the phone, but not play it elsewhere. What about all the music and movies on my computer at home? In the near future, connectivity will be fast enough that when I take a picture or video with my phone, it is added to my online photo library instantly. That repository will be linked with my identity, via my authentication. Technologies such as OAuth and OData are already being developed to service this need. The end result is that all my devices – my phone, my television, my tablet, my laptop – can access all my stuff, all the time, automatically, from anywhere.

Decentralized Relationships

Not only does Facebook have all your personal details, your browsing habits, and your media, it also stores (and uses) your personal relationships. Once we have open communications technologies such as StatusNet and OStatus in place, we start to see a completely decentralized, open social network for connecting and sharing with the people we trust. Again, no single entity needs to store your personal information. One group that is attempting to put it all together is Diaspora, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Why not now?

It would seem that everything we need to create this digital utopia has been developed, so what's the hold-up? The low-level technology will simply enable new products to be created for the general public. The biggest challenge with standards and new products is adoption. All the providers of these services need to buy into all the standards before they can interoperate. Even if that happens, there must be a critical mass of consumers using the services to draw them away from their 500 million friends on Facebook. Nobody's doing it, because nobody's doing it. The future isn't so far-fetched though. I mean, how hard could it be to digitize medical records, right?