The Worldbeam and the Next Web

What will the web look like in the future? According to one Yale professor, it will be very different than what we use today.

In a recent issue of Forbes,  David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, paints a scenario that once seemed out of reach but now feels more plausible given the rising use of rich Internet applications.

Gelernter envisions a giant beam of information - a Worldbeam - that's organized chronologically. All of your data is stored on the Worldbeam. You decide who can access its micro components and how. However, none of your data is stored locally on your PC. Information follows you no matter what device or computer you use.

The Worldbeam scenario sounds similar to an artificial intelligence vision expressed Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It's definitely the stuff of science fiction. Still, if you squint you can see the building blocks are in place today. These include the River of News approach to reading RSS feeds and - coupled with it - an increasing movement to organize/store content by time and date-stamps.

Gelernter predicts...

"Every organization will tell its ongoing life story via electronic documents. A newspaper will generate a beam of stories and photos. (Fresh stories are posted at the end of the beam as soon as they are filed.) If you get your news from three newspapers, one cable channel and 12 blogs, you can blend their streams and keep an eye on them all simultaneously. When you tune in your custom-blend news stream, you see a time-ordered list of postings--the world according to all 16 of your sources interleaved, shuffled together."

Should this vision becomes a reality, it could have a big impact on how we consume and create media and how corporations tell their story. Whether you buy into this theory or not, the piece is fascinating and worth a read. Clearly there are lots of privacy concerns. People like having their information close at hand, but perhaps today's Gen Yers and others who grew up with the web will be the first to embrace the Worldbeam.