I was amazed when I first saw this as it combined two main technologies, one being their Seadragon image zooming and the other a technology that literally analyses and stitches together images in to a 3D space (no not the Quicktime equivalent).

For me though the future link is when they line up the idea of dynamically pulling semantic content from Flickr, because the content is already tagged, its a no-brainer to see how humanity could document the world through images.

The exciting part is linking this back to broader content through the existing semantic connections already created.

You maybe already interested in viewing the image you have in front of you, but at a right click you could view related content (Wikipedia?), or even take a look at the profile of the person that took the picture in the first place.

You can also see the connection of 'Multi Touch Screens' being able to navigate using your fingers would be more intuitive.

Multi Touch screens have been around for sometime now, although the majority of people have not seen this yet, in Europe they are already part of the furniture of bars and clubs.

The cost is already down significantly to make this a real technology to change our lives on an interesting level. Both for fun but of course we have all seen minority report and how it can be put to serious use (and I don't mean predicting the future).

The iPhone brought a hint of what we have in store for the future, it is also an example next step for how we interact with web sites and content. Our next generation of web sites will take this in to account.

This is Nicholas Negroponte (A founder of the MIT Media Lab), making the same predictions back in 1984:

A very cool video
What is the definition of web 2.0?

In our quest for world wide web domination, we tend to get carried away and always need to remind ourselves these. Here's a link on an article written by Jakob Nielsen.

So here they are http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Just Sharing,
Mo Farik