This post is in response to http://www.aeris.dk/kommentar.php?id=754 [da], written by Anja [da], who’s wondering if the internet will exist in 10 years, how it will work and if it’s worth bothering to buy a couple of domain names for her children. An interesting question, so I thought I’d drop my 2 cents here…

I say, buy the domain names - the internet will definitely be around in 2015 and I’m pretty sure we’ll still be using domain names. I mean, if you look at the last 10 years of evolution of the internet a few things come to mind. Email hasn’t really changed much over the years - the protocols are still pretty much the same, only the clients have really been updated. IM has come around and has become very popular - still I prefer good old IRC over Jabber and MSN any day. I don’t really think that’s evolution - that’s just making a well-known concept more user friendly and taking credit for it. Then there’s P2P action - that’s a relatively new concept with the decentralized network and all - but file-sharing isn’t, people have been doing it via FTP for ages and are still doing it. VoIP is definitely a new thing, though it’s quite interesting that back then we used internet over the phone, now we phone over the internet. :-p MMORPG - the Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games, they’re kind of new, but still, from 8-5 years ago I was (actively) playing a MUD (Multi-User Dimension/Dungeon) named The Two Towers and that’s definitely Multi-player, it’s Online and it’s RPG. Now they’ve just added graphics and made it more bacndwidth intensive. (I’m sticking to T2T, thank you.) ;-) Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon; at least, it’s a sort of new buzzword. People have been posting (un-)important stuff on their personal websites for ages, but now it’s become popular and everyone has to have one. Personally, I think it’s great - it’s making the web more personal.

In general I’ll say that the internet is evolving - but slowly. Compared to the innovations done in the hardware business, the internet seems to almost stand still. Of course, there has been upgrades in connection speed - I mean, seriously - 10 years ago, who had ever dreamed of a 2mbit pipe? (Yeah, I still dream about it…) And along with the speed new stuff is coming up - like the “rent and watch a movie over the net” services and other bandwidth intensive stuff. Personally I think it’s great … if you have the bandwidth. (There are 3rd world countries where you have to pay a fortune for a 28.8kbps connection.)

Last but not least, honorable mention goes to Google. They’ve really been making the way for some pretty cool and interesting “next generation” web-apps. Talk about making good use of HTML/JavaScript.

Did I forget anything? (I got out of bed like 30 minutes ago, so I’m still not really awake.) What do you think we’ll happen to the internet in the next 10 years?