It seems a cop-out to have an 'others' category, almost as if I haven't got round to writing a detailed overview for them. And that's true, to some extent. :-) But also many are things that, although important and interesting, somehow didn't feel to me to be on the same scale as the other trends. In many instances, they're subpoints of some of the bigger trends, but I wanted to pull them out to highlight just so they don't get lost.
In no particular order:
Music downloading is here to stay and will become the norm. Playlists will be the new album. Having traditional-style CD albums will come to seem passe before you know it. I think though we might see a very small resurgence in the area of customised CD's. The same way as when I was a kid you made tapes for your friend and decorated them with stickers, fancy writing, etc, I can imagine a little cottage industry springing up to let people make something tangible involving the music that's important for them. Whether it's to give as a gift (e.g., a lovely boxed CD of the songs played at your wedding, along with photos, speeches, interviews) or as a memento for yourself (e.g., 'songs that saved my life in college'), it'd be a nice personal keepsake to have on the shelf.
One in five Americans over the age of 12 now owns a portable digital music device - Ipsos quoted by BBC 30 June 2006
Digital identity is becoming increasingly important. By this I don't mean just the social networking stuff like being on Linked In/Friendster/Myspace/etc although that's part of it. I mean something broader. The whole concept of how you represent yourself online, and the level of trust that engenders will become something that people work hard to develop. At the moment, "trust" is limited to within the boundaries of an individual community. Perhaps the best example of this is Ebay. The more times you buy and sell on Ebay, the more opportunities there are for others to rank you. The higher your rank the more trustworthy you're deemed to be. It's not to say that a high rank is always a guarantee of trustworthiness - a friend of mine who shall go unnamed slightly shocked me when he revealed that he actually 'bought' a high Ebay ranking by acquiring one from another business and merging it with his own. I didn't realise Ebay allowed that, but I digress... Generally, a high ranking is a reasonably good indicator of trustworthiness and it's certainly a whole lot better than a low one. I wonder how long it will be before Ebay 'licenses' the extension of Ebay rankings across other sites seeking an instant way of having trust metrics in their ecommerce communities. Hmmm..
The nature of news is changing. How people get their news is changing, with the web now well ensconced as the standard channel for many. This is particularly impacting morning newspapers, as people checking their news at breakfast online already know far more than is in the newspaper edition! At the moment, online news is seen more as a companion to TV news, especially local news, rather than a substitute. (In a research project I was involved with, people talked about sitting down to watch the news with their WiFi laptop besides them, so they could get more details right away on any interesting stories). But it's not just the means of distribution that's changing, more fundamentally it's also the concept of what's considered to be 'news'. There are many more sources of news than there used to be. Not only has the spread of 'official' news sites online opened up a range of channels that people would otherwise not have had access to, now there's blogging and 'citizen journalism' as well. Whatever your political stance, you can find someone reporting in a vein that suits you. Whatever niche topic you're interested in, there's a blogger or ten covering it. And now, with RSS readers like bloglines, it's easy to keep track of all these multiple sources of news - effectively, RSS lets you edit your own paper. Now, RSS is still a ways away from mainstream not helped by it's scary acronym of a name, but it's spreading fast. There are all sorts of interesting moral/societal issues to debate around this, and some fascinating discussions to be had about the future of newspapers that I don't have time to go into at the moment. But as a thought provoker, if you haven't already I encourage you to watch this: EPIC 2015. (And for an alternate, darker version, try EPIC 2014 via the same link).
UPDATE: I'm in process of expanding this into its own page here
Open-ness. This is a bit of a wishy-washy one, I wasn't sure what to call it. But it strikes me that there's something interesting happening in terms of people's expectations for what they're able to do online now. In the early days of the Internet I remember that all the buzz was about 'captive audiences', 'walled gardens', 'locking in'. The idea was to make it hard if not impossible for people to uninstall your software, go beyond your content, up sticks and port over their stuff from your service to another. But that's all different now. These days, even if a service doesn't support exporting directly (and most do now, as it's something a lot of people look for as a criteria before signing up after having been burned in the past), there'll be a hack out there that gets round it. Even the most annoying of walled gardens that remain, that of different IM's, is starting to crumble. Nowadays, people start with an expectation of open-ness that they didn't have 5 years ago.
VOIP. It's going to be huge over the next few years. It already is bigger than you probably think. It's going to be normal very quickly, and Skype is well on the way to being the Google of the VOIP genre. And like Google did, Skype is growing outrageously fast, purely via word of mouth.
Console and online games going mainstream - ***still to write***
Search will be the gateway for (almost) everything. - ***still to write***
