A look at Some Interesting Web Predictions

Let’s take a look at a few predictions made many years ago and also see how many of them became reality or was just a mere fluke.

At first, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989, published a paper proposing an “information management” system for his laboratory done to improve information links between many universities and researchers. It only nailed a comment: “Vague, but exciting’’ by His supervisor, Mike Sendall.

But, Guess what, it made the way direction for the World Wide Web we know today.

Obviously many plunged in with various negative ideas and concepts since Sendall, going on about how it is very unlikely for the Web to have an impact on society. They were almost wrong!

And here is how:

As predicted by Bill Gates 2004- Spam will be gone within two years.

The Microsoft (MSFT,Fortune 500) founder said spam would be gone within two years. Email filters and “human challenges” — forcing the sender to solve a puzzle, for example — could help cut down on unwanted emails, Gates said. He also predicted a “payment at risk” system in which email senders were forced to pay fines when their messages were rejected. “Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past,” Gates said.

Did this really come true? Yes! But for filters only and 10 years later, almost everyone is still receiving clogs and bulks of spam emails.

As predicted by Newsweek, 1995- Websites will never replace newspapers.

The magazine published an anti-Web screed from cyber security expert, astronomer and author Clifford Stoll, the web named by him “a wasteland of unfiltered data”, after the proposed selling off of Newsweek for $1.

“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper,” he wrote. But here we are today; everything has gone “www.anything.com “at least you are reading this online. 🙂

As predicted by Robert Metcalfe 1995- The Internet… will explode?

A high esteemed engineer Robert Metcalfe who was one of the inventors of Ethernet networking technology was concerned that too many acceptance and usage of the web would over burden it. Metcalfe said the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

As of today, that has not happened, hey, check this out, you are reading this online.

As predicted by Columbia Journalism Review 1995- The Web means the end of Big Brother

I would give a big laugh to this, a mere look at Facebook Twitter and other social media networks just erases this bizarre prediction by Lawyer and researcher Peter Huber. The increasing ease of communication in the Internet era, he predicted, would make it impossible for governments or corporations to control the flow of information.

Hey, the internet gives unlimited access to almost anything, how could someone predict otherwise? Take a cue from major internet tech companies like Google and Facebook and not only that, government can easily track people once they go online. This definitely annuls this prediction, Big Brother is definitely on.

What would be your predictions about the web?