Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has made some bold predictions that the internet will undergo radical transformation over the next five years. He was right about the marketing value search engines would have and as the dominant online player, Google’s decisions directly affect the future of the internet, but Google’s success may have given Schmidt slightly less than prophetic delusions.

His prediction that mobile web usage – internet use via web-capable cell phones – will surpass internet use via desktop is based upon some misplaced presumptions:

1. Cell phones are fully capable of displaying the internet.
2. Proper cell phone design can provide robust navigation and adequately sized keyboards.
3. Increase in cell phone quality equates to increase in utility.

I recently purchased a Samsung Moment (with Google!). Next to the iPhone and Verizon’s Droid, I found the Moment to be the most web-capable phone available for the money. It features a full-length touch screen and sliding keypad; this is near the pinnacle of mobile web capability, and while very useful, it fails to offer a full web experience and remains an enhanced communication tool with “local” accessories.

First, it is not as though too few mobile-optimized websites exist; there are plenty of vertically-oriented, column-style sites to browse through and I eventually plan to offer a mobile version of Smobot. But honestly, how much time can anyone be expected to spend myopically squinting into a cell phone? For most (sane) people, the answer is, unless they have to, not much when there is a bigger and better option available.

Secondly, I am a man and my stupid big fingers are not compatible with even the largest cell phone keypads. My text entries via cell phone are necessarily going to be abbreviated to… oh I don’t know… even less than “140 characters or less” (see Twitter), if that’s possible. Which brings me to my next point.

Cell phones and the mobile web, no matter how great the quality, are size-limited. That means punctuated communication spaces, narrow web portals and little room for clutter like ad space, large images and viewable video. So I do see the mobile web dominating, but somewhat restricted to social media, live photo/video sharing, local search and audio media. By that I’m mean no disrespect to the mobile web; rather, I would not want to see webmasters getting carried away with the mobile web paradigm shift. Again, the mobile web is about immediate communication and location in time and space – news updates and local search.

Furthermore, the observed uptrend in mobile web usage has not been observed to cannibalize desktop internet usage; both are growing. And the growth of the mobile web is tied to the infiltration of web technology into the already existing huge cell phone market, meaning that almost everyone has a cell phone, and that as an increasing share of cell phones offer the web, people are naturally going to pay a little extra for it.

Identifying the future of the internet may have more to do with time-management and paleontology than technology. You can look at cell phones and consider that they’re  always with us, “here and now,” and therefore must be the future of the internet. But if a cell phone is a somewhat awkward and clumsy way to experience the internet and bigger, better, faster solution exists, which one would you prefer? And if you examine our culture, we have become increasingly compartmentalized over the ages, spending more time in one place than in transition between places. So where do I see the future of the internet? Why not television? What if the internet and TV got married? What would their offspring look like? People spend hours in front of their televisions for entertainment, programmed by television programming. But with the advent of video services like YouTube and Hulu, individuals are now able to guide their own programming high specificity thanks to keyword search. Why not take the whole internet to the TV? HDTV and a global fiber-optic network has made this entirely possible. The only missing pieces are a cable-box / PC hybrid and a remote control / keyboard hybrid. That’s right, a cable box that functions as a fully functional web browser and a television remote that doubles as a folding keyboard. Of course, this revelation calls for another blog post entitled “The Future of Television – 2010 and Beyond Your Regularly Scheduled Programming” or something.