I don’t know whether looking to the future for clues as to what will be the next big internet phenomenon is useful or whether it is the kiss of death for any ideas that we believe are poised to revolutionize our lives. However it is fun. So onto the discussion of what will be the next Twitter inspired by this article at IMediaConnection.

Mobile Social Networks
There are already more mobile devices in the world than PCs and that trend is only going to continue. In the US, younger urban demographics in particular show much greater propensities to use their mobile devices than computers. As our social network apps migrate to the cell phone, how will they leverage the new capabilities of being GPS-enabled or being able to interact with the physical world around them by tagging the physical world with scan-able codes? (Insert Twilight Zone theme here)

Social Video
The people at IPG Emerging Media Lab feel this is important so I’ll take their word for it. Imagine watching TV with several of your closest chums while all of you are comfortably sinking into your comfy couches. The concept of wrapping social tools around our favorite multi-media habit seems like an obvious extension of social gaming. However, it will have to be executed in a way that still allows us to vegitate in a video stupor without asking us to engage too much. We have our limits.

Digital Out-of-Home Social
This is really all about the concept of augmented reality which is a great term that sounds a bit like something Timothy Leary would advocate. It’s reality plus a digital component that makes it even better than the old reality. I’m looking at you across a cloudy bar and my mobile device is researching our connections across social networks, our shared musical likes and dislikes, our favorite shopping sites and the next thing you know we are having a deeply meaningful conversation that leads to marriage and children. Or maybe you would just like to interact with the running shoes you are considering buying by tapping into your social network for recommendations. It’s reality, but so much more.

Facebook 2.0
Twitter may steal the headlines but Facebook is the serious behemoth in the social space right now. The next step is for it to move away from becoming a destination and continue it’s evolution into becoming a platform that envelopes our whole experience of the web. We already have a rapidly growing number of sites using the Facebook Connect technology to bring your network to them. Facebook could very well become part of the essential fabric of the Internet or the backbone of the entire user experience.

Google
The omni-company of the web will certainly not be left out of the web’s future. Will they create the world’s next web-based OS? Will they create collaboration platforms that bind us all together as workers in the digital hive? Who knows but we will surely be Googling like crazy until they plant us in the ground.

Amazon
Amazon has developed the world’s greatest cloud-computing system (The Amazon S3 Network) and at the same time has beceom the leading ecommerce platform. What will they do to take advantage of these opportunities? How will social commerce change the way we consume and the way marketers reach us?

Gaming
Will game platforms converge with TV or will TV adapt to gamers? However it plays out, gaming is integral to the lives of this generation and is already becoming a profoundly social act. As the rendering capabilities increase we will continue to immerse ourselves in other worlds of increasing complexity and richness.

What is your take on the Twitter of the future?