Remember how back in the day, the year 2000 was going to be this amazing unimaginable nirvana of science and technology development of almost sci-fi proportions that was going to change our lives forever? Then 2000 came and went without even a sniff of personal jetpacks for all. Now it seems 2020 is the new 2000, when it comes to dreaming big and pinning our aspirations for a better world in which technological development which will have solved all our problems… sort of. The non-profit think tank Pew Internet & American Life Project has spent some time picking the brains of 578 “internet leaders, activists and analysts” to forecast how technology will evolve in the near future, and what roles it will play come the year 2020.

As the report authors Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie say: “[The boffins] expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.”

Jacqui Cheng writing for Ars Technica says:

“Whether all these predictions will actually come true by 2020 will be another story, but it certainly seems as if the Internet-using public has a good grasp of how things can realistically evolve in that time. Now, let’s just hope that DRM’s demise is a little closer than the year 2020.”

Yahoo developer Havi Hoffman is one of the voices represented in the report. On the Yahoo Developer Network Blog, Hoffman says he’s been reading Pew’s reports since the group’s launch in 2000, and can’t recommend them highly enough:

“Pew Internet reports have explored every aspect of how U.S citizens use the Internet and how it has transformed friendship, family, and community life; the way we work and play; the way we learn; the way public policy is made; the way media is distributed, consumed, and shared. Pew Reports have provided me with data to help make sense of hunches and observed behaviors, identifying patterns, describing trends, and offering facts where once there were none.”

Ed Oswald at Technologizer thinks the chaps at Pew are being a tad conservative in their predictions:

“I fully expect the Internet to be much more immersive. Everything we own will be connected, from our clothing that will know when we are sick and will call for help on its own, to our cars that will use the Internet to avoid traffic, to our lives themselves which could nearly be lived 100 percent digitally if we so desire. Matrix anyone?”

Yahoo Mail platform launches, paves the way to social networking
As Om Malik predicted they would, Yahoo yesterday launched a new mail platform which they’re calling ‘a smarter inbox‘ featuring shiny new integration between Yahoo Mail and sites such as Flickr, as well as social networking tools that allow Yahoo Mail users to connect with each other.

Malik is optimistic about this Yahoo effort:

“As I wrote in my previous post, ‘Yahoo has an unique opportunity with this platform. In particular, it plays to Yahoo’s strength in making complex technologies simple for a mass market audience, a trick Google is still struggling to master.’”

Sam Diaz at Between The Lines has one small issue with the new launch:

“If Yahoo wanted to jump right into social networking within the mailbox, they should have launched this effort with access to the Yahoo Address Book, instead of making it a “coming soon” feature. After all, the first thing that any social networking site – Facebook, MySpace and others – does is to try to tap directly into your e-mail address book to start building social relationships.”

BusinessWeek updates a 3-year old print story, gets 2800 comments online
BusinessWeek has an interesting take on hybridized reporting, borrowing a leaf from bloggers and collaborative journalism to update the May 2005 (print) cover story Blogs Will Change Your Business which remains incredibly popular, with links, annotations and a plea for crowdsourced additions. An editor’s note accompanying the update, whose headline has been adapted for our changing times (Social Media Will Change Your Business) reads:

“When we published “Blogs Will Change Your Business” in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.

So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.”

The story itself won’t be news to anyone who already follows the industry, but if you know anyone who needs a quick primer on blogging and social media for business, send them the link.

Bernie Madoff backlash begins on Facebook
There’s nothing like a collective sense of outrage at the greatest securities fraud ever committed to bring people together – and what better place to gather for an outpouring of vitriol than Facebook? There are now 18 Bernie Madoff impostor groups for fans and enemies alike where anyone of that bent can practise their morbid fascination and flex their schadenfreude muscles. Alas, good ol’ Bernie himself isn’t on Facebook (as far as we can tell).

For an idea of the scale of the Madoff shakedown, see Bernhard Warner’s Big Money column on Slate this morning.

(Disclosure: Bernhard Warner is a co-founder of the Social Media Influence blog)