It’s not that often that I get thrown by an email from a colleague.

The subject line was “URGENT need your help” and the gist of the request was that an executive was making a presentation to an important client the next morning and was looking for a perspective on where “Social Media and the Internet” was going to be “five plus” years from now.

I don’t typically shy away from these types of questions. I have what I believe to be a reasonably informed perspective on where things are going and with a fairly well rehearsed set of caveats, I’m more than happy to share it.

That said, five years is a really really long time – especially in Internet time.

If you think about how far we’ve come in the past five years, specifically as it relates to social networking on the web, it seems like the world is completely new. So with all of that, the question sort of threw me.

However, I’ve been pondering the question and I think I have an answer.

I think the big change coming to our social web in the next five years will be the adoption of decentralized social networking.

The “Federated Social Web” is actually the term gaining momentum to describe how I think things are going to change.

What is the Federated Social Web? Well at its simplest, it’s a set of social networking experiences and tools that interoperate across platforms.

Rather than provide a detailed technical definition of my own, I’ll point you to two that I liked while doing research for this post.

• Evan Prodromou of Status.net provides a very readable definition here.
• Richard Esgueera writes for the EFF on the topic here.

(I’ll share some other interesting links that I’ve found in a separate post.)

To be very clear, I do not believe that Facebook, Twitter and the other big players are simply going to go away. What I believe is going to happen is that as the user experience of the tools associated with creating a federated social web improve (including the install and management experience), an increasing number of users will choose to host and manage their own identities and social graphs.

At first glance this change might not appear to be significant, but don’t be mistaken, this is an evolution of our social web infrastructure. It is important because a change in any underlying infrastructure typically drives dramatic changes in practice associated with the activities that the infrastructure is designed to support.

Think about how home broadband adoption changed things. Think about how smart phones are changing things now. I predict this will be the case with this change as well.

So how will this evolution impact practice?

Well, for the Facebooks, Twitters and other current leaders, in order to continue to remain relevant, they will need to find a strategy to participate in this context rather than to try to own it. They will need to become interoperable themselves. In turn, this change will drive change in the ways that users are able to manage their social data, identity and privacy on these platforms.

This evolution will also drive change related to the whole practice of “Social Media Marketing,” but since this post is becoming much longer than I thought it would be, I’ll hold for another post for a brief discussion on how I specifically think social media marketing will change.

Overall, I think the user experience of our social web will improve greatly and as such the value that it provides to us in our everyday lives will be taken to the next level.

I think we are already at the beginning of this move to a Federated Social Web. There is an increasing amount of dialogue around the topic and there are a significant number of projects to create tools, platforms and applications.  Additionally, there is a W3C incubator group and a Social Web Acid Test use case to continue to drive the discussion forward.

I offer this prediction up as what my father would term a “Gentlemen’s Bet.” At the moment, with strong anxiety over needing to save up for Edmund’s college education as well as a down payment on a larger home, I hope you won’t mind that I’m not offering up this prediction as an official wager.

As I said earlier, five years in Internet time is a really really long time.