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You are in London, desperately craving some butter chicken but don't know who to ask. Simply log into Google Maps on your mobile and get directed to the nearest Indian restaurant, an experience you can later recommend to your 1000 friends on MySpace, a social networking site that allows you to meet people, listen to obscure bands, share pictures, write a blog, plan events and play games.

We are connected to people and services like never before, due to new technologies that help us localise and personalise information, which we can share with people across the world. Facilitating the trend are innovative online companies, which are using the Web as a platform to blend software, data and information into a lively cocktail of "social software".

This phenomenon is commonly referred to under the umbrella term, Web 2.0. While the Internet has always allowed sharing of photographs or files, now it has become very easy for even an 80 year old man or a 10 year old boy to maintain an online journal or blog.

If the first wave of the Internet was about commerce and tech-geeks, then according to its champions, Web 2.0 is about the ordinary users, who are shaking up the online status quo, all for free. Inspiring creativity and inviting wider participation, the new people friendly technologies get better the more they are used.

It is easy to choose your news with sites like Newsvine, or post your pick of the day's news on Digg, where it can be voted upon by other users to bag a place on the homepage and be thus viewed by millions.

Thanks to YouTube, the world is your stage, where you can command a truly global audience for a goofy stint in front of the camera. The big deal about YouTube is not that the tiny 67-employee company was recently acquired by Google for $1.65 billion last year, but the fact that it makes video sharing so easy. No wonder that an astonishing 70 million people visit the site each month.

 Soon it will be easy to envision a future in which your online calendar would know your name, place of work, business interests and lunch hours, to help you organise a business meeting simply by linking that information to others' in your address book.

According to Vinton Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet's architecture, there is still a lot more to come, with over 90 per cent of web applications yet to be invented. In some ways the Internet's future now resembles its past, when it was just a research project known to a few hundred users who were also the ones involved in its creation and evolution. What is different is that a medium that was exclusively reserved for the US government has swelled to a galaxy of millions of individuals in perhaps the greatest experiment in self-organisation known to man!

With states challenging the US monopoly over domain names, and ordinary users assuming greater control over online content, the debate on the control of the Internet has entered the realm of cultural and individual freedom. In a recent article, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that the debate on the freedom of the Internet is 'more of payback politics, tied less to ideas than to an increasing global frustration with the US.'

The Internet has always been a relatively democratic medium with low barriers to entry, but remixing of content by ordinary users is giving sleepless nights to copyright-dependent industries. At the same time, the "flattening" role of digital technologies is prompting states to re-evaluate their policies on regulation of the Net. But for every state effort at regulation, there is a clutch of young entrepreneurs online, dreaming up yet another re-mix for netizens. The future is passé, and the only thing we can expect is the unexpected. 

Email author: preeti.saksena@hindustantimes.com