Back in 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson released a video that looked to predict the future of digital. In fact it looked forward a decade – focusing on March 2014! It was titled EPIC 2014 but most people referred to it as the GoogleZon video.

In those days before Twitter the video still managed to spread like wildfire from blog to blog and it makes a whole host of interesting predictions given where the web was at the time. It pretty much coincided with the dawn of the ‘web 2.0’ era and actually predates Youtube (let alone Facebook). It broadly predicts the rise of social media & location services as well as the privacy issues that all knowing corporations like Google and Amazon would create. It also identifies the fact that most of this social content would likely be rubbish 🙂

The video predicted the print news business being put out of its misery quickly rather than the slow, creeping death it is enduring but it foresaw the legal issues ahead for things like Google News and the description of Google Grid sounds a little bit too much like Google Plus for it to be a total coincidence!

If you have eight minutes to spare I recommend watching it – just the fact I remembered it so well a decade later speaks well of it I think.