mikolas

The Future of Online Communities?

Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital has a thoughtful post about online communities. My prediction is that online communities as we view them now, will eventually become extinct as mobility becomes the key factor and we move from communities to always on presence services - a form of pervasive computing.

Just by looking into recent developments with Facebook entering instant messaging arena and AOL acquiring Bebo, or giving Microsoft’s Windows Live platform a deeper thought, the trend should be quite clear: communities, instant messaging and voice/video over IP will merge with mobility and location awareness. This of course will not be a massive shift that happens overnight, but takes a few years as we still lack an audience with sufficiently capable mobile terminals. Maybe this is the grand strategy behind Google’s mobile efforts with Android.