We have seen many new things appear in the last 7 or 5 five years on the web: Facebook, html5 appeared, new browsers grew strongly, Google failed with Wave...

Since Facebook and other stuff like Gtalk and Gmail, I thought and hoped that forums, chat, mail, usenet, conversation rooms and p2p protocols could inter operate to allow the user to use all those services transparently.

Of course I realized that things are far much complicated, for several reasons:

• the IETF cannot invent new things: they just propose standards.
• Microsoft as well as big players often are obstacles to relevant innovation regarding open formats. The biggest stories being document formats or internet explorer with its long reaction to support web standards.
• Smartphones, thanks to the appearances of OSes such as iOS and Android, are finally able to navigate on internet: former devices were deaf, they weren't directly connected to internet.
• The mail protocol were left unchanged even with the grow of spam and malwares.

I don't know what to think, because I think there is still a lot to do, but I feel like it will never happen or that nobody seems interested in those basic text transmit features...

So what do you think what are the next big steps in the evolution of the web ? Do you think is will still walk hand in hand with open source ?