The future of the web as I see it

I think the web will fundamentally change within 2-3 years. The internet came to a point where separation of different tasks will become necessary for organizations to stay competitive.

I think there will be 3 different types of internet companies, which will emerge from existing companies practicing one of these tasks well or from new ones taking advantage of the opportunities created by this new setup.

The first layer of organizations will be content owners, such as news sites, blogs, archives, etc. These are sites that focus on creating and organizing original content. This content will be tagged and put into format that computers can make sense of using technologies of the semantic web concept. They will not be focused on sorting or presenting this data to their viewers. They will be primarily making money on syndicating this original content to the next two layers.

The second layer of organizations will be the filters. Search engines and social bookmarking sites will become the filters primarily, although I don't think they will be using this term to describe themselves. Their task will be to filter out the relevant and quality content from the plethora of new content appearing every second within the content databases. This task will be done by highly sophisticated (by today's standards) artificial intelligence software that will go through millions of pages of content to deliver the highly targeted small amount users can and want to consume. These companies will be making money on advertising and subscription based models. These organizations will not be focused on the creation or presentation of the content.

The third layer is presentation. These guys are going to focus on how to present the data in the most user friendly and efficient way across many different platforms. There are several sites taking the the beginning of this road already, like Google Reader or iGoogle, but in the future content will be presented in a much more interactive and dynamic way. This is space the designers will be working most of their time. They will make money on advertising and subscription models. The presenter sites will not care about where the content is coming from or why certain items are selected, that job will already be done by the first two layers.

Each of these layers will communicate in a standard and open way with each other. Those who will not adhere to these standards will alienate themselves from the majority of audience thus cutting themselves off from traffic and revenue. Within each layer there will be thousands of players each competing against each other for the attention of users. There will surely be companies who will operate in all 3 layers and favoring their own products, but they will have hard time competing with companies who focus on one layer only and do that best.

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