• We all will grow incredibly fat
• Everybody will become utterly stupid
• Laziness will become society’s steepest problem
• The Internet will totally disappear

Ok, this might sound hilarious and incredibly off record, yet every prediction is extremely linked to the future of the web. Let me explain why.

1) We all will grow incredibly fat

Since the introduction of the iPhone, people tend to surf more and more using a smartphone. Windows mobile users, nor BlackBerry, Nokia or any other device or mobile OS manufacturer created a browsing experience that was so fun to use. And never before was a phone the portal to such an enormous amount of applications. Over 10 million users worldwide downloaded up to November 2008 (in only 4 months !!!) over 300,000,000 (yup, 300 million) applications. Most of them allow you to sit down, relax and do what you want to do. Examples shown were ordering pizza, flipping a coin, turning on the heat, checking one’s bank account and even feeding the neighbour’s dog from your own lazy couch.

And as obesity is often caused by a sedentary lifestyle, we are pretty damn sure that the years to come we all will become very fat.

2) Everybody will become utterly stupid

Yet another unpleasant prediction. Or maybe not. The Google founders stated in an interview in Playboy (yes, that’s true, you can still read the article over here) what their utmost goal was: building a brain extention worthy that name. Sergey Brin even said:

“You can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example, you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”

They are halfway there with the google mobile app they released in December for the iPhone. Or think about how tools like Evernote made our life easier or cool gadgets like Livescribe offer new ways of connecting one’s memories to the Internet.

You see the need of being smart is no longer there once all gadgets and tools that surrounds us take over our memory…

3) Laziness will become society’s steepest problem

A third observation we made is the fact that your browser will become so smart, that it does most of the (dirty) work for you. The semantic web, as it is called, makes it possible for computers to understand and cooperate better with humans as Tim Berners-Lee once said (in 1999 already!). Many tools enable those experiences already, but it will get even more exciting the years to come.

Your PDA, GPS, cellphone, email program, browser, other applications, even your camera and your game console and settop-boxes all keep tons of data about you. It is only a matter of time before we can truly benefit from all data stored on those devices to inter-connect with each other with the power of the Internet as a catalysator. We gave three examples of how your life might change dramatically…

… in such a way that you never ever have to think for yourself again. Just let your devices do the talking.

4) The Internet will totally disappear

But it doesn’t matter one bit, since the Internet will disappear any time now. Or at least, the way we know the Internet will change. We entered the era of pervasive computing, meaning that everyday objects will be connected to the Internet. Better known as The Internet of Things. And forget about the Internet being limited to be browsed on your computer or mobile phone. It will be possible to collect data from it using RFID tags, graphical tags or even virtual tags (also called virtual graffiti) from anyplace anytime.

One day (well actually today if you live in the US) you will be able to take a picture of your internet connected phone and get info back about it: cheapest online prices with the immediate possibility to order it online or even prices at stores nearby with the route descriptions to it if you prefer so.

The Internet - as we know it - will have weaved in the fabric of everyday life as Mark Weiser once said (in 1991!!!).

The podcast of our entire session can be watched here and it is still possible to subscribe to it, as we will be updating it on a regular basis from January.

Or have a look at the presentation on Slideshare:

The complete article can be read over here at the Proximity blog. And if you long for more fun ways of looking at the future, feel free to read our next blog post ;-).

Tom visited our Digital Natives sessions several times and we were happy to be included (any time now) on the INMA weblog.

• Seamlessly “connect” the Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find friends who also use your site or invite those we don’t know about it  yet
• Share actions on your site with Facebook friends by posting newsfeed stories

Off course, all of this with the privacy settings you use on Facebook. Meaning that you have to set permissions for being contacted by the site owner or that you have to permit me to post the fact you commented on this site manually.

Yet, this offers many possibilities for smaller and larger site owners. Facebook has over 1,6 million users in Belgium and over 140 million worldwide, making it the largest and best spread social network on earth (note: for the moment, Netlog remains the n° 1 network in Belgium with 2,5 million accounts approximately).

Connecting to a site (and by doing so, giving away your gender, name, location, hobbies, interests and so on) is easier than ever before. One click (or actually two, since you have to hit that ‘allow’ button once as well) makes this a breeze. And requiring extended access (an optin for instance to send regular updates) is even easier. A small text appears in the side column once you connected to this site and remains there until you granted access to receive updates. And that is - once more - not more difficult than clicking one single button.

Another big advantage is the viral aspects Facebook Connect opens by tapping into the Facebook site. Inviting your Facebook friends to a site is easier than
typing in email addresses you can hardly remember, right? The invite box you will see is the same one you use when inviting friends to other applications within the Facebook website.

And - it’s not over yet -  every time you post a comment on this blog, I kindly ask you if you want to share this info on your newsfeed. Because every time you do so, all of your friends will be notified that you wrote something on my blog.

Clicking the button above, results in a newsfeed entry like the one below.

I even managed to get the community aspects working, meaning that I can show you - once connected - who of your Facebook friends are also connected to this site. You have an immediate overview of what they commented on, enabling you to see what they are interested in. You can even click and see their profile or contact them (or any other member) directly using Facebook Inbox.

At Proximity BBDO we are currently using Facebook Connect in several projects. More about that as soon as they see the light…

I’ll keep you posted when the actual site goes live…

AdNerds are on Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service, allowing people to post updates about their live within 140 character messages. You can follow other people to stay up to date. Sounds rather strange at first, but do give it a try and found out what it can mean for you. We will be posting about the stuff we are reading, writing, working on etcetera.

You can follow our updates on http://twitter.com/adnerds. Tools we use for following Twitter and updating are TwitterFon on our iPhone and Twhirl (an Adobe Air application).

And we will be updating our podcast on a regular basis from the second half of January. Feel free to subscribe and stay updated about our marketing insights that we will be sharing on a - to be determined - bi-weekly basis.

For 6 weeks (from November 13 until December 18) we held 6 sessions about the Digital Natives, persons who grew up with digital technologies. Since they grew up with computers, mp3 players and mobile phones their brains are wired differently than most of us. That is one of the reasons Don Tapscott describes them as the smartest generation ever in his new book ‘Grown Up Digital’. We wanted to inform marketeers and advertisers involved in every day campaigns directed at this specific target group how to make sure their actions are 100% on target.

Our hands-on sessions (well, 4 of them, we had one introduction and an outroduction) were held in the House of the Future, Living Tomorrow in Vilvoorde, near Brussels. We couldn’t imagine a better place for our sessions to take place.

Session 1: The Digital Revolution. We talked about how not only people are changing due to the digital possibilities, but also about how businesses changed massively lately. We showed examples of industries that were both positively and negatively influenced by the Internet.

Session 2: Generic and Niche Social Platforms. You probably know - or at least heard about - Netlog, Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. And you might have heard of A Small World, Shelfari or Ravelry.  Youngsters spend lots of time on those sites. And as a marketeer there are tons of possibilities of leveraging those platforms capabilities to your benefits.

Session 3: Online Advertising. Traditional online advertising is ‘passé’. And new channels, rules and possibilities are already queuing the line to take over. We have a deeper look at social network advertising and talk about viral, free and video marketing.

Session 4: Listening to Consumers. Two-way is one of the most used terms to point out the difference between web1.0 and web2.0. But conversations are only relevant if you start listening first. Understanding what your customers are talking about should be a priority.

Session 5: The Portable Web. Often confused for the mobile web, we talked about widgets, gadgets, desktop applications, embed codes and how portability are the new way of spreading your message.

Session 6: The Future of the Web. We ended our sessions with 4 predictions about the Future. We discussed the semantic web, the future of mobile and more interesting possibly next steps for the 15-year old Internet.

More info on our Digital Natives website.

All slides were posted on our Slideshare account and we made video’s about all sessions that were put online on our blip-pages. Or you can just have a look at all of them underneath.

All data is collected from the Delicious database and your username and password will therefore never be stored on our servers.

Direct your iPhone or iPod Touch to http://delicious.allabout.be, enter your details and you are ready to go!

Ginger has been announced a while ago on the web2.0 summit in Berlin in November 2007. I was there together with two colleagues of mine (our creative director, Jan Algoed and Geert Leysen) and must admit I was very intrigued by what Tariq Krim from Netvibes told (and showed) us in a 20 minute presentation. The demo looked promising and the theory and reasoning behind it were very clever. ‘Social aggregation‘ was key in his speech and it was something Tim O’Reilly forecasted to be a hot topic in 2008. Instead of - once more - inviting all your friends to a new web2.0 site, social aggregation would enable you to add friends from other social networks without too much efforts. API’s and the OpenSocial project allow developers to check your friends at Facebook for instance and easily search for them on the new platform or allow you to easily follow what they do on their platforms of choice in the one you prefer.

Anyway, I was amazed. Only a few weeks ago Ginger went into closed beta. I immediately started looking for a way in, but didn’t succeed. I even followed Tariq’s twitter very closely and tried emailing him, but my email probably stayed unread in between his other thousands requests of fans ;). Anyway, today I received an email from netvibes stating that I was part of the closed beta from now on. So I started checking out Ginger immediately.

Here is my two cents after a two-hour try-out:

• I switched from Netvibes to Bloglines because I mainly used it for reading my blogs. Bloglines is way easier and it loads like a million times faster. This is still the case and a major issue (imho). It loads sloooow.
• The AJAX-implementations are done great. It looks beautiful.
• The new Ginger theme is nicer (e.g. rounded corners) than the ones available before
• Adding content is way more userfriendly (I prefer the wide box on top over the small left hand bar) but it lacks some things like the possibility to see how many people have installed the specific widget, the possibility to rate them, the possibility to sort widgets within a category on name, times added to a user’s page, …
• Uploading an OPML file didn’t work out fine. But I guess they are aware of the problem.
• Finally everyone can make his own ‘universe’, which is your public profile page. It is like the private one, but most of the times with less information :). But you only get to make one universe (not one for myself and anotherone for my company for instance - subscribing a second time would solve this offcourse)
• You can easily star items, which is adding a comment to a favorite widget or post that is shared with your friends. Besides the fact that I often don’t have the time to keep with things I like, I don’t think it is that interesting to know what my friends like best. Especially not with how it is implemented now: like the twitter-followers page you have an overview of all activities of all your friends. There is no way to limit the list to just one friend’s starred items or to only show the status updates instead of all updates in an easy way. Offcourse you can browse to your friends’ page and check his activities, but it should be easier (e.g. by sorting/grouping). 
• Starred items are put in an ‘activities’ overview per day. A little strange I think. I don’t remember when I starred a specific item and it seems to be necessary to remember that to find them back, since there is no search provided. I am fond of the bloglines ‘pin this’ or ’save this’ functionality they added in their beta. It allows you to put items you star in categories you can manage yourself.
• You have a public and private activity overview, there is no possibility to watch both activities together.
• Your friends’ activities seem to show up in one long list. It doesn’t look at the calendar even if you explicitly select a specific day. I have only one friend for the moment since there are no other people I know ;-) but I wonder what it would look like if I have 30 friends that use Netvibes very intensively?
• There is little consistency in naming: ‘universe’ and ‘public profile’, ’star’ and ‘favorite’, what you ‘make as favorite’ shows up as ‘Bart has shared’ etcetera.
• Adding friends (or searching for friends) is easy: they build connections with API’s from gmail, yahoo mail, MSN, AIM and more (facebook to come). However: you can only search who is in the netvibes community already. No way to invite friends or to add friends that are solely on other platforms. I hate for a fact that I can’t check the status updates of my Facebook friends in Netvibes for instance. Tariq was full of social aggregation and ginger doens’t add much more than some API integrations. I hoped for a more complete aggregation (true aggregation).
• Searching for friends in the netvibes database of users is not possible. You can only search within your own friends. Adding friends can thus only be done by using the API-solutions or by browsing through your friends’ friends and adding the ones you know.
• Sharing widgets (on your univers, on your blog or using mail) is easy and require only a one-click operation. I might however want to send a set of friends interested in a specific topic a specific widget, but that’s not possible. The advantage of having friends in ginger is not used as it could be. Something for the future?

I am a little disappointed as you may have noticed, but has mainly to do with my expectations. The update is big and interesting, but as it is in a beta it still needs some work. Useability wise there is a lot of work and on the functionality side a lot of updates/improvements can still be made.

PS: if you have no clue about what I am talking, have a look at this post on the Netvibes forum. Tariq gives a small demo on the new functionalities.

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