New internet startups are opening for business every day, especially with the current boom in social media. Which websites do you think will form an 'old guard', and still retain a position of importance 20 years into the future?
Interesting question! I'm going to hazard a guess and say something like Twitter will probably be around for a long time. 20 years? Possibly not, but it is going strong and changing, which is important. Recently I've been looking at the usage of social media in Journalism, and Twitter is becoming both a more valuable resource to journalists (in the way content is filtered and distributed) and also a useful way that they can saty in touch with the general populace. So I think Twitter will stay online, but probably change into a more professional site. Secondly, as said by cody below, Google Thirdly, I'd guess news sites such as BBC News, Sky News etc, will continue to be around online in 20 years, in fact, newspapers will probably have a stronger online presence by this point than print (even now, it's pretty close). I'm not sure what else, but the internet is an ever changing beast so it's really hard to predict what will happen as trends come and go!
Social Networking sites come and go, think of Myspace, or hell, think of Bebo (does anyone remember that?), or think of the hundreds of others that have come and gone. I see facebook slowly becoming less popular over the next five or six years, they'll make too many changes and drive away the core of the community. As with anything it'll probably take a while to die out completely. I'd say in a decade they'll be straggling. One thing to think about though is it's such a giant at the moment, it may be hard to knock it off the top spot. It's more likely facebook will bring about it's own demise.
aol.com will be around as long as there are technical incompetents out there.
I think that niche publications like the New Yorker or the Economist will be around for many years to come. They serve specific functions and target a specific demographic, it is the ubiquitous "I want to serve everyone" type of sites that are a flash in the pan. Imo