I am one of those people who follows what Loic Le Meur and his crew are up to ... mostly this means that I follow the seesmic blog ...which includes updates to Seesmic.com, the Seesmic plug-in marketplace, ping.fm, the ping developers group and twhirl
Everyday it makes me think about the new "cultural geography" that is being built ... it's a geography that does not depend as much on roads or buildings ... it doesn't even depend upon one form of internet or wireless infrastructure or another [internet/wireless access is important to get there now; there will better ways in 25 or 50 years] ... the cultural geography is built around new communities that are being built -- these communities are not built on ports, on rivers on railroads or roadways ... these communities are getting built according to interests. As with our physical cities and towns, many on the ones that were important early will fade; some will become much more popular and powerful, new ones will be built. The big thing about the cultural geography is that physical geography does not matter nearly as much as it did ten years ago -- in another ten years, physical geography will matter less ... in 50 years, physical geography may not matter at all.
Another thing about the cultural geography, you get to pick which communities matter to you -- you can choose NONE, you can build your own ... you can choose communities that are primarily populated by people from Russia or Brazil or China [who still think differently than you do ... although this is less true than it was 10, 25, 100 years ago and will continue to change]. Right the list of the worlds most important communities [to me] looks something like the following:
Twitter
Facebook
Facebook Pages
Google Buzz
MySpace
Ning
GTalk Status
AIM Status
LinkedIn
Tumblr
Identi.ca
Brightkite
FriendFeed
Plurk
Jaiku
Blogger
Plaxo Pulse
Bebo
WordPress.com
Custom URL
Delicious
Koornk
YouAre
Multiply
Yammer
Flickr
StatusNet
TypePad
StreetMavens
myYearbook
Posterous
Photobucket
Yahoo Profiles
Tagged
5Y4.me
5s4.me
BestSteakInTheUniverse.com
Bidm.at
Biermonger
BreakNeck Cider
Clichesaurus
CloudKernel
DOYNK.me
Drup.bz
FRJ.me
Finance Genome Project
Funnier.Be
GRN.AM
Inner Dufus
LIB.fm
NRG.ag
PR4.bz
PWR.fm
Pyrolytic Edge
SKTCH
SQL.ag
Seeds of Action
StopPD.us
THK.fm
TRZ.me
Venture Genome Project
YMD.me
frix.in
r8r.bz
recyclecamp
