Over the past few years I’ve stopped wondering which site will be the next big thing and started wondering: “Why am I using a website to share this information in the first place?” Let’s be honest, do any of us seriously think that 20 years down the road we’re still going to have a Facebook page with thousands of photos?

The internet as we know it today typically serves four functions: sharing information, purchasing goods, finding information, and cloud computing.

We’re slowly starting to see the movement in the mobile space where people really don’t want to go to a .com to get tasks done.  They want in and they want out.  They don’t want to bother with logins and passwords, and the idea of a shared computer is only going to become less common.  Instead, our interactions will be even more personal, from our personal devices that have our credentials already stored.  We won’t have to worry about what a third party wants to do with our information, because our information will be entirely housed, shared and synced from our own devices.

Yes we will still need to have some channel through which to exchange and broadcast that information, but it will not be a site. From where I see trends moving, future “social networking” will instead get pushed out from a personal hub to all of your friends.  This way your information and your friends’ information stays in sync without the middleman.  It’s decentralized social networking and you can learn more about a fledgling effort called Diaspora here.

But what does this mean for web development and design? Is the internet seriously heading entirely towards “applications?” Well yes and no.   Mobile applications are clearly working to replace many of the previously free web sharing services out there, which were largely profitable due to advertising.  However check the Facebook application and you won’t find ads.  In the world of mobile computing, in-app advertising is largely unwelcome.  Many would far sooner pay for an app than suffer through cumbersome ads that slow an app down and occupy precious screen real estate.  Without regular advertising dollars, the future of these free social networking services is a bit unknown.  If, indeed, we slowly make a move to decentralized sharing, then many of the Flickrs, Facebooks, and Linked Ins of today will serve little purpose.  There will still be a market for apps to tie into the sharing “tubes”, but the good news is your personal info and data remains under your control, whether or not Facebook goes completely belly up.

E-Commerce websites aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  These sites clearly don’t claim their revenues through ad dollars, and so far the only mobile apps I’ve seen for any retailer haven’t compelled me to use them more than once.  If you’re a mobile retailer and you want to get an idea of what you should be focusing on tomorrow, look to Amazon. Thankfully, this godzilla of e-commerce has still kept their approach relevant by investing their time and money into a mobile version of their website, and boy is it great.  Given the capabilities of smart phones today, you can provide very rich and dynamic browsing experiences and also tie into features like location services to show your customer nearest locations (and calculate shipping).

Online information sites will also be around for decades to come.  While informational sites rely on advertising, they also get away with it, since they are neither an app, nor a site dedicated to commerce. All the same, it’s essential these companies invest the time and resources to compete with sites like eHow.  By visiting this site on a mobile device it becomes clear that eHow realizes their client’s needs while still affording some space to serve unobtrusive, and quick-loading advertisements.

Finally we have cloud computing.  The future for cloud computing will slowly reach it’s potential with HTML5.  From the experiments I’ve done, the google docs I’ve managed and the demos I have seen using cappuccino, I can say that for many low processor level tasks, the browser is more than ready and willing to handle online and offline tasks.  Better still these apps are inherently cross platform, so the only true requirement for the end-user is a free download of the latest and greatest supporting browser.  From a developer standpoint, all of this can be built from a simple text editor.  It may herald the demise of Flash, but this isn’t likely to take full swing for another couple years.

No matter where the web is headed, one thing is for sure.  We currently have a boom of mobile computing devices and a slew of sites that are not designed or built to support them.  We have an emergence of new web technologies that has serious potential to rock the foundation of desktop applications.  Between these two developments, there is a lot of potential and a lot of work to be done in the coming years.