There are billions of devices able to transmit data in huge (by today’s standards) quantities. Trends say we will make more devices, cheaper, more powerful and give them to a higher percentage of the seven billion human inhabitants of this planet.

This guy Julian Assange has certainly had a big impact, but he is only one man. Let us assume that some government decides to neutralize him through prison or assassination.

The age of transparency will still be just begun. The risks to data security will likely only increase as the number of avenues to transmit information increase.

The only response? Make sure what you say behind closed doors has at least a passable resemblance to your press releases.

This sounds like a story lede so inflammatory and sensational that it wouldn’t even make it onto the local TV news. Yet, statistically, its just a fact of life that many, many people who use Facebook will die this year.

Nothing sinister is at play. Remember, as investors pile millions into the company with the big blue F, they back up the soundness of their reasoning by telling themselves that there are nearly 600 million active users of Facebook. That’s a pretty significant population – twice the size of the United States. And when you talk populations that big, you can make predictions based on public health statistics, which is what Fast Company has just done:

It’s a question of percentages. Sure, there is mortality rate of just 0.100% for people between the ages of 20 and 24, but when you start talking about massive sample sizes, that’s going to be a number that sounds shocking – 22, 640.

Then again, let’s think this through – how many people who use doorknobs will die this year? How many people who leave this mortal coil in 2011 will have consumed PEANUT BUTTER at least once in the past 12 months. IT COULD BE THOUSANDS. MILLIONS!

The real point is that Facebook is reaching a scale at which it become a public utility. Skype – which has around 27 million users at any one moment, users that pay nothing – released a profuse apology for letting their largely free service go down for a few hours. Now, as someone who remembers a time when rural areas like where I grew up only got one TV station in dubious quality, I find it fascinating that CEOs now apologize when they cease giving away free intra-planetary telecommunications for 24 hours. The world sure has changed. Social media is not consider a frivolous entertainment,  it is more like water, sewer and electricity – people expect it to just be there.

Facebook is getting more publicity that the average religious deity because they are hip and relevant. Then again, think of the hipness and brand awareness of your typical utility company. Does anyone write feverish, excited prose about the new business model of the water company in your city? Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just taken another medical leave of absence, and markets are holding their breath. When was the last time that happened for the CEO of an electricity distribution company? Who can name a SINGLE natural gas provider?

Utilities tend not to stay on the front page forever.

I remember forecasts back as far as 1999 that by 2015 or 2020, the biggest user of the Internet by far would be other machines. Medical diagnostics, vending machines, cars – they numbered in the billions and all would have great reasons to share information – to say “I’m broken,” “I’m out of soda” or “Hey, you have early signs of cancer – go to the doctor.”

Now that we have WiFi throughout the industrialized world and emergent adoption of IPv6 (offering unlimited discrete IP addresses) this future Internet of Things could be right on schedule. Cisco’s chief futurist discusses this in a recent live broadcast, in addition to some basic ideas for how innovative companies use futurists to drive growth and profit.

Paul Denlinger, a very astute observer of U.S.-China business relations has a fascinating piece up at China Vortex discussing two very different notions of freedom of information that are colliding soon.

One view, ostensibly “American,” is being espoused by Google, Facebook, and their respective CEOs. In short, this view is the early Internet mantra of “Information Wants to Be Free.” Opposing them is the Chinese government, which obviously believes that government should play a role deciding which information goes where in a society.

Read Denlinger’s analysis and decide whether the issue of “information sovereignty” and “individual rights” are as clear as you might think. It just goes to show the incredible role culture needs to play in all of our analyses of the market.

Facebook will be worse than an abandoned shopping mall, and Twitter is doomed – or so sayeth my favorite comic, Patton Oswalt. (While it may seem to strange to cite standup comics for business insight, I submit that there’s nothing more comical than most of mainstream business television right now.) As such, I thought that his announcement that he is joining Twitter contained some cutting analysis on the future of social networks and the stability of their business models in an era of ultra-easy product substitution:

So, I’m joining Twitter this Saturday.

And, eventually, whatever replaces it.

I was on Friendster. It collapsed. I jumped on MySpace, and now it’s pretty much an abandoned shopping mall. I still get about 30 Friend Requests and 15 messages in my Inbox every day, but they’re all mailing list bullshit for bands I’ll never listen to, or porno-bots promoting some young Eurasian hottie. Even the comments are clearly all bot-generated. An abandoned mall still had trash, heating and cleaning services drop by, I guess.

I’ll still update my calendar and galleries here, but that’ll be about it.

Don’t feel bad, MySpace. Facebook is also, clearly, on the way out. Constant spam ads, weird privacy wormholes — yuck. Any social networking site, like a great punk band or TV show, has entropy and collapse built into its biography.

Remember how fun Friendster was for those three or four months?

His scenarios, however, are my favorite:

And Twitter will collapse, too. What will replace it? Here are my 3 predictions:

BlipBlap: Basically Twitter, but only 17 characters allowed, and no vowels. Xclnt!

Wh1ff: The first-ever “scent site” — you update your status from an “odor board” of 170 different scents. “(Snnnnnnfff) Patton had chili for lunch and he’s somewhere humid.”

DanzaQuip: Every single status update on this site is first sent to Tony Danza’s personal e-mail. He then decides which ones to post, and is the only one who can respond or comment. (*This site will replace the U.S. Post Office in 2027)

Really, is it any stranger than a prediction that 400 million people would voluntarily post embarrassing photos online in an ultra-complex social web of their coworkers and former elementary school classmates?

I loved this graphic, picked up on Twitter. (Click to enlarge) Not sure who Bozarth is, but it’s a clever comparison of social media to the original electric social medium, the telephone.

A few observations, picked up from our years of discussing innovative technologies and new social trends with leaders:

• When people say “It can’t be done,” they usually mean, “We can’t control what will be done with it.” Control, or more accurately the perception of control, is considered FAR more important than creating the forward motion of innovation. Control is almost always the most important value in a large bureaucracy,  more important than revenue generation and even profit.

• Most new communication technologies are tested out informally before they become official way of doing “work,” and thus are usually classified as “fooling around, wasting time.” Consider that back in 1996, in the days before Competitive Futures, while using the Internet to research competitors for my then-CEO, I was taken aside by a junior manager who accused me of “playing video games at work.” The video game in question, incidentally, was the EDGAR database of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Most every generation underestimates the tech savvy of the generation succeeding it, while simultaneously overestimating the complexity of the next generation of technology. Back in 2000, we did a landmark study of the future of information technology for the construction industry in which we predicted the increased use of cell phones, laptops, GPS, and electronic building plans. Many of the older executives rejected the notion that “construction guys” would be using “the Internet and computers” by 2010. Two assumptions here were faulty: that computer skills were the dominion of the educated, and that “computer” meant “giant, clunky desktop” instead of a smart phone or Toughbook. Today, even the poor kids have Playstation and cell phones, and intrinsically understand electronic menus and text messaging. The generation is more tech savvy, and the tech is simpler.

• The argument of late technology adopters is usually predicated on the idea that they have a CHOICE as to whether the new technology impacts their business. If history is any guide, you can either adopt major technology shifts or wait to see what your competitors will do with the technology. If this is still a question in your mind, why don’t you ask the music industry what it’s like to deny the inevitable.

As such, Competitive Futures is bullish on the long-term impact of social media. It seems inevitable for a host of technological and sociological reasons.  Pause for a moment to consider its impact on your customers and your internal management.

Yes, it sounds dorky, but these are the weak signals that portend the coming revolution in telepresence.

Will h.264 prevail? What about Ogg Theora? This may seem like a strange debate for anyone not deeply involved in technology analysis for enterprise-quality video, but consider Cisco’s recent purchase of Tandberg, Logitech’s purchase of strange bedfellow LifeSize – there is a clear megatrend for video becoming a mission-critical technology for running businesses and keeping in touch with friends.

But many chess pieces are about to be moved. Check it out.

The future of video conferencing: having a physical representation of you in a room, a mannequin with your face digitally projected onto it.

Creepy? Uh, yes, that’s a word that comes to mind. But people in a few years may look for all kinds of ways to enhance long-distance communications, and this may not be as disturbing.

In the meantime, it’s an interesting technology in a phase of rapid growth.

I was just surfing SlideShare for some competitive intelligence – always a great source of left-of-center information, unusual sources, and stuff that never gets published. I cam across a provocatively titled slideshow about how digital imaging killed the corner camera shop. Even though the market exploded, the model shifted to one where there was no margin for customer service of any sort.

Food for thought for this Monday.

So Google is coming out with its own operating system, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. It will likely be lightweight, simple, cool and functional like pretty much everything they do. And also evident is the fact that Microsoft should now be hyperventilating, as this development takes direct aim at its aging business model while also pointing at the future of computing.

Google is now threatening to bust the trust owned by the world’s richest man. You may remember a fantatastic, precient essay by Neal Stephenson entitled “In the Beginning Was the Command Line,” in which the author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash pointed out the near absurdity that the world’s wealthiest businessman made his money selling operating systems, as opposed to chemicals or railroads or minerals or something real and industrial. The untold riches in the production of user interfaces really did seem surreal at the time.

If you think about it, though, their business model was strikingly industrial in the Henry Ford, mass market vein. In the Golden Age of Microsoft, computers all hungered for standardization and interoperability if they were to function as something other than an electric paper weight. Whoever could forge that infrastructure could make stupid amounts of money – not unlike the railroad or the telephone. Not only did the infrastructure model pay off for Microsoft, they also harnessed Henry Ford’s mass production model, shipping out millions of individual boxes of “software” to individual users about the globe. It “scaled up” but at massive profit to the manufacturer.

And now you can officially say the 20th century is over. Even Microsoft, a digital age company, has succumbed to the new business models of the future. Google’s new operating system is harnessing all the aspects of the next generation business model. Google OS will be free, perfect for a variety of small, light devices intended to access the internet and cloud-based services. It’s not that you won’t be able to run Microsoft’s operating system and software tools – it’s just that they will no longer be the only game in town. Their competition will need to come from innovation, customization, and service rather than size, exclusivity, and scarcity that stems from limited technologies.

Record companies have learned this the hard way.

Newspapers are learning this the hard way.

Telecom is learning this the hard way.

No doubt, large and unwieldy, Microsoft will learn it the hard way as well.

Now…what about your industry? What will it need to learn? And will you be proactive, or will you be happier learning it the hard way?

I snagged this from Don the Idea Guy, but it’s an amazing view of how right we were in 1981 to think this would be cool.

I mean, can you imagine INTERNET COMPUTER NEWSPAPERS?

While we are all arguing about credit-swap-derivatives and Keynesian economics, science and technology moves on.

This is a holographic image of Ray Kurzweil, techno-utopian, singulatarian, author, and inventor of incredibly awesome musical instruments. Announced today was the joint venture of Google, NASA and Kurzweil on a project called “Singularity University.” For $25,000, you will be able to study artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology in depth over a nine week period, ostensibly to explore the concept of “singularity,” the intersection of these technologies that could theoretically mean a radical leap for humanity.

I am conflicted about this.

Let me say that I love Kurzweil as a polemicist. His book Age of Spiritual Machines posed insightful questions about the development of neural nets and advanced computing, making us consider just what our interactions with non-carbon life could look like. He asks pertinent questions with imagination and daring.

My conflict is over his more recent book The Singularity is Near, which is techno-utopianism claptrap taken to its most absurb level, a book that says mortality can be conquered and conquered soon by the magical intersection of IT, nanotech, and biotech. Specifics on this intersection are not offered, nor supported by peer-reviewed scientific literature.  The methodology for his forecasts is non-existant, a textbook example of how simple extrapolation of current trends can lead you to conclusions without validity. For example, I don’t believe that nanotech and biotech will allow us to live forever as holograms in our iPods just because we’re spending a lot on genomics and nanotech research. We don’t even know why we sleep, nor understand how proteins are coded from the genome, nor a million other basic facts about humanity. Can we learn? Sure! Are their leaps in understanding? Absolutely! Can we count on them? Not so fast – Mother Nature gives up her secrets on her schedule, not ours. And every answer obtained usually means 1,000 more questions.

Most of the healthcare community is terrified of the real future of taking care of Baby Boomers with diabetes, heart failure and Alzheimer’s, while the “transhumanist” community is going on about we can defeat death in 2023 and live forever as Second Life characters. I find the worldview frivolous at best.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t right.

Mind you, I’m not betting on uploading my brain into an iPod anytime soon, but I don’t want to dismiss these people or these thoughts at this moment in time. I think we’re getting very distracted by the turmoil caused by globalized finance and industry. This is understandable, but anytime people are this involved in a crisis, we take our minds off the vast majority of other things going on. And while we’re fixing our monetary system – which will take years – scientific research and development is going to keep progressing. Somebody ought to be watching it and considering a broad range of scenarios. In this case, I’d rather have a guy like Kurzweil pushing the envelope. We need to consider best- and worst-case outcomes and discuss it well in advance.

Why my change of heart? Look up current progress in surveillance technology. It has come so far, and is moving so fast toward a society of constant observation- with totalitarian implications – that it is clear that science and technology is not waiting for us to clean up our 401(k)s. It’s moving along, with or without us. And all of us, Ray Kurzweil included, need to keep thinking about it.