" Within the next few years, technology will improve your life in ways you can scarcely imagine."<p>I doubt this. It would be nice if there were some details provided with such a grand statement.
Let me get this straight here. Bookmarking, re-tweeting, and posting links on tumblr count as content creation for the purposes of this article?<p>I'm a bit incredulous as I don't really see it as such. I'd venture to say that you still only have ~1% of users creating content with any substance, let alone quality.
<i>By designing new interfaces, and suddenly making information accessible...</i><p>This is a very important point. Although we do harness a lot of our focus on creating "new and innovative" products, we mustn't forget about the less-fun industries that still effect our lives daily. The way that we fix these industries is through the interface and how we interact with and manipulate that data (e.g. medical records, tax information, etc.). Take what we've learned from the companies mentioned here (e.g. Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest) and apply it to existing industries.
I agree with the characterization of the past but I don't think curating is the answer either. You can't easily distill quality content out of a sea of junk. Much of the best content on the web still comes from traditional editorial organisations like NYT, Economist, etc. Free-for all social content works great for sites like StackExchange but I don't even think Quora, which is kind of like a curator, is going anywhere.
"Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one."<p>True story. Personalization is the future. Too many content so far.. take it.. examine it.. deliver it to each person separetely..
Don't be misled into believing that the web is "going" somewhere merely due to the success of some high profile growth in certain areas.<p>Where is the web going?<p>Everywhere.<p>If you don't believe that the web will become the backbone of human communication and the primary repository of recorded knowledge then you simply aren't paying attention. Facebook and tumblr are interesting sideshows but they are nothing compared to the real growth of the web, which is proceeding slowly but surely in the background largely without fanfair.
I don't think Pinterest is an example of the curated web. It's 4chan for the scrapbooking crowd. None of the content seems intended to last as some sort of resource, it is essentially Facebook without anything but the photo-sharing. Like 4chan, it's a stream of experience where any meaning the content may have is transient.