Time's Person of the Year, Web 2.0 and What's Next?

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."[Time Magazine's complete article can be found here]
This is very heartening to see that a Technology (Web 2.0 in this case) gets credit for something more than just making humans work (physically) less. By providing ordinary users an inexpensive mechanism to disseminate information to potentially millions of users in a timely manner, technologies like Web 2.0 are the catalyst of an emerging social phenomenon. This social phenomenon empowers ordinary users by allowing them to do things (create and share content globally) which were considered to be the right of privileged some (governments and media tycoons).
No doubt this social phenomenon brings tremendous opportunities but it also comes with potential dangers. Preserving user privacy is extremely important as lack of it can result to user distrust in the technology and hence potential downfall of the social phenomenon. Like many other researchers, we also have been thinking about ways to solve this problem. We believe that an optimal solution would be built upon recommendations aimed at both technical as well as social impacts. For time being, we have recently proposed an architecture for privacy preserving collaborations for Web2.0 applications which makes some technical contributions. We are now aiming at intelligent user interfaces for helping users in making informed decisions regarding their privacy requirements.
Last but not the least, happy christmas/holidays to all of you.