My theory about the future of the web

The shape of today's network is rapidily changing. First there was dot-com bubble, now we have Web 2.0 and „user generated content" era. It's time to wonder what's going to be next.

I'm not the first one to mention that, but I think that in the nearest future we'd see User Generated Portal. I can imagine users that are programming features they need in portal, and share this code with others. Firefox plugins seem to be an example of such idea but on client's side. No one has yet created technical possibilities to dynamically create web portal and include custom applications in it.

Facebook API is the first sign of new era. But their implementation is very simple. Sorry, but including 3rd party content in an Iframe is just a raw hack, not a solution to the problem. They also don't provide any kind of hosting, to run application you have to run your own datacenter. If you could upload applications directly to portal it would result in a trivial deployment cycle (from the programmer's point of view).

Nowadays programmer work time is very expensive. Everything suggests that this price isn't going to fall, even with the crowd of cheap chineese/Indian developers. The demand for software is growing.

Try to imagine web portal with all possible features anyone could ever need. The only problem would be to learn how to use them. That is the job for the portal owner. He should carefully choose enabled applications by default for each target group.

Today building new features is limited primairly by developers, it can be changed.