I love technology. Always have. Even as a kid I loved to figure out the gadget du jour. For the past four and a half years I’ve been immersed in what we’ve been calling “Web 2.0” and for the past couple of months I’ve been on hiatus. During this time I noticed that keeping an eye on Twitter, Techmeme and a couple other places, I could stay up to date. I might go a several days without checked my once much vaunted feeds and when I did check feeds, I marked everything older than 48 hours read (thank you FeedDemon!). Again, I didn’t feel like I was missing much.

Walking around BlogWorldExpo this weekend and Gnomedex last month, I didn’t see anything revolutionary or groundbreaking. Nothing that made me step back and go, “whoa”. Yes, don’t get me wrong, there have been some amazing recent innovations for microblogging, video, commenting, lifestreaming, but these are making good ideas better.

I’m thinking, though, that there is, thus far, a tremendous amount of unmet potential in netbooks, the foundation Google Chrome represents for web apps, and what could happen if laconi.ca reaches the status of POP, SMTP and IMAP.

Which brings me to the important question here, who is stepping up to create the “what’s next” thing? I’m going to grant you that I just might have become jaded and a wee bit cynical, but chatting with several folks at BlogWorldExpo, people who’s opinions I value, I got universal nods of agreement. We haven’t see a really amazing something new in a while. Not the shift from 2.0 to 2.5 or 3.0 per se, but something that will have lasting importance.

Yes, touch computing did, as many thought (including me) it would, change how we’re dealing with devices. The iPhone is amazing so is Surface, these are taking interfaces to new levels and we have seen other interesting launches, but something is missing.

And I really wish I knew what that something is.

I wish I could put my finger on it.

Step back with me. No, not in time, up to the “big picture” level of things. We see more and more and better and better ways to share things, do things, buy things, sell things. We’ve seen tremendous innovation in making things faster, more reliable, smoother, integrated.

I love it. I love that I can toss my EeePc in a bag and be able to do things that I needed a larger computer for not that long ago.

Still, something is missing.

I’d love to discuss here, discuss at BarCamp this weekend, what that something might be. Where should we go next.

This would have made a great panel at BlogWorldExpo, and I’m sure that groups of people were talking about this over dinner. I’d love to hear about it.

Let’s hear what your vision of what’s next is, while I mull and formulate my own.

I was at BlogWorldExpo last year, helped with the conference and was on a couple panels. I had a really great time, of course. Last year a lot of the buzz and topics were on business blogging and the business of blogging. Lots. So much it got to be a bit much I think.

This year, while business blogging, etc are still on the radar and have a prominent place on the program, it’s Twitter that is everywhere. Talking with Rebecca about her live blogging, we agreed that people aren’t looking for, reading, and linking back to live blog posts like they used to, Twitter has become the place for session/panel coverage.

I saw tweets along the lines of people sick of hearing about Twitter in every panel (not just tracking what’s going on, but its use as a tool), but I also saw that when a panel had a hashtag, it could quickly jump into the top 5 Twitter topics in that hour.

Where is this pointing? I’m going to go as far as to say that Twitter has gone mainstream. Well mainstream in the tech set at least.

Is this the BlogWorld effect or just good timing? That I don’t know. However, from now on I’m sure that microblogging is firmly entrenched in how we communicate and, this is the cool part, how we share/cover/interact/coordinate during conferences.