Just for grins, I was looking at the slides of a talk I did ten and a half years ago (March 1994) about this new thing called the world wide web. Pretty much everything on my "future of the web" slide came into practice pretty quickly, with the possible exception of a general-purpose proxy architecture to keep sites from getting slow. Some of the p2p crowd are working on things like this now, of course, but there's still nothing in general use.

Remember when Adam Curry's MTV.COM was the coolest thing around?

It's interesting to think about all the things that I probably should have predicted but didn't.

- Chat boards like this one

- Slashdot, blogging, and the notion of flash crowds

- Java, Flash, and the scourge of annoying web advertisements

- HTML everywhere, and XML taking over the world

- Web interfaces replacing custom front-end apps for client-server computing (or, the web browser as the modern incarnation of an IBM 3270)

- Search engines as the most important application on the web

Any other big things I missed?

Spam and fraud?

-mmorpgs

-p2p/iTunes

-internet phones (not widespread yet, but it's coming)