Yesterday I attended the Barcamp conference in Brussels. One of the more interesting presentations was given by Denis Balencourt from Skynet, Belgium's largest internet provider. Here are some highlights from his vision on the future of the internet:

2007: Dedicated search tools surpass generic search engines. Ping services like Technorati have an inherent advantage over crawlers like Google.
2008: Social internet applications determine the US election debate.
2009: Viral news and social applications question the social gap. Political power is questioned anytime.
2010: A human-like digital meme tracker reads news and comment discussions 24 hours a day.
2011: Access and control of the [internet] mediators is vital for industry and political groups.
2012 - 2015: Voting through electronic devices is secure. Mobile voting and web voting lead to abstention rate drop.
2015 - 2019: Virtual reality immersion is possible with emotional and physical interaction.



I don't agree with some of his predictions, like the synergy between RFID chips and Europe's Galileo GPS service making it possible to locate any object by 2008. Or the development of emotion-control devices by 2019. Anyway, we should do more of this out-of-the-box thinking about the future.

His slides [PPT] (in English) are available for download. A video of the presentation (in French) is available on Google Video (31 minutes), together in one file with Clo's talk on the history of the internet (in English) - video courtesy of Maarten Schenk.