Robert Scoble is calling the future of technology the Game of Games. What he describes though is more like a war, with two of the world’s largest tech juggernauts — Google and Facebook, competing for data and ultimate control of the information that makes up our online identity. He sees the next couple years as one in which these two companies use new tools such as social plugins and smart phones, in conjunction with old tools like search and email to understand not only who our friends are, but also the food we eat, music we listen to, politicians we vote for, and even the Gods we worship, and ultimately using this data to earn billions of dollars off the transactions we make online.
This conversation on the future of technology is a result of our mentorship lunch series, in which we flew winner Dimitry Lukashov from NYC to San Francisco after answering the question on Quora, what technology trends will most dramatically change the world in 2015.
While we filmed this conversation just over a week ago, the recent F8 conference lends a sense immediacy to this new direction. Facebook announced more advanced APIs that will further integrate our social graph into the web and help build a more robust “identity platform” based on not only the explicit actions we take on Facebook, but the implicit actions we do on all Facebook connected sites.
The video below is 30 minutes long but entirely worth a watch from start to finish. In the first segment (minutes 0 – 16) Robert shares his thoughts on what the web of 2015 will look like. In the second segment (minutes 16-30) Dimitry and Robert, spitball on topics ranging from education to health and privacy. The implications aren’t relevant just for these two companies, but for business and students across the country. Robert predicted an increased demand for students who are able to understand this new world, which means an increasing value in computer science and statistics grads who can mold all this data into new products and sales/marketing/business opportunities. He predicted a decline and ultimate failure for twitter (the site has too much noise and not enough data control) and a future where more companies are using the social graph to cater our web and purchasing experiences to the identities we hardly even know we’re sharing — for better or for worse.
Hope you enjoy the session, and feel free to leave comments below!
