Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee visited Silicon Valley to speak with scientists and tech executives at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. this week. In this video clip he offers his view, which he previously expressed in this blog post, about how social networking will evolve in the next five years. Responding to a question from Robert Scoble, he predicts, or hopes, that all the programming of new Facebooks in five years time will be done at the application level rather than the presentation or document level and provide a consistent way of looking at different aspects of people across the Web.
This echoes what Berners-Lee wrote in his blog post, which I covered here:
Letting your data connect to other people’s data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don’t have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.
