The Pew Internet and American Life Project has outdone itself this year. Over 1,000 Internet activists, builders and commentators taking part in the “Future of the Internet III” study have weighed in on how the Internet will look in 2010. The main takeaways from the 138-page report:

– 81 percent of respondents said the mobile phone will be the primary connection tool for most people in the world and that universal standards will allow cell phone users to maintain consistent service across different parts of the globe. “They won’t think of these things as ‘phones’ either, said Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an ICANN board member. “These devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”

– The Internet will NOT increase social tolerance by the end of the next decade, said 55 percent of respondents.

– Copyright technology to control content distribution and use will be mostly gone by 2020, according to 61 percent of respondents.

– Respondents were split on whether the public nature of sharing one’s activities via social networks would lead to less “pain” when an online video “outed” an individual’s activities in a negative light.

– 56 percent of respondents felt that “most well equipped Internet users will spend some part of their waking hours…at least partially linked to…alternative worlds.”

– “Haptic” technologies based on touch feedback – including virtual keyboards projected on a flat surface – will become widespread by 2010, said 67 percent of respondents. Talking to devices will also increase (and people nearby will think that’s perfectly normal).

– A substantial 81 percent of respondents felt that the Internet as we know it will still be in place in 2010, rather than being replaced by an entirely new technology.

– 57 percent of respondents said that the lines between work and personal time will be so blurred as to be almost non-existent…and that that’s OK, they added. As one anonymous respondent put it: “It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”

The Pew report is filled with quips and quotes from the 1000 plus respondents. A smattering of predictions we liked:

“By 2020 I don’t think it will be so easy to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop,” said Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “These will blend into a general ‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don’t yet have a name).”

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, was more circumspect. “The big problem with the cell phone is the UI (user interface), particularly on the data side,” he said. “We are waiting for a breakthrough.”

Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine, proclaimed that “telephones in 2020 will be archaic relics of a bygone era – like transistor radios are today. Telephony will be entirely IP-based by then…when we want to communicate verbally, we’ll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.”

On copyright protection, Giulio Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, quipped “You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps ahead of DRM and content will be re-distributed on anonymous networks.”

Regarding privacy in an age of Facebook, City University of New York professor and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis said we are entering “a time of mutually assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses.”

That will only be augmented by the blurring of the line between the real and virtual. “Real life as we know it is over,” pontificated Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company. “Soon when anyone mentions reality, the first question we will ask is, ‘which reality are you referring to?’”

And when it comes to the future of the computer-human interface, InfoLock Technologies CEO Sean Steele’s vision was straight out of a sci-fi novel. “While air typing and haptic gestures (will be) widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of embedded optical displays, thought transcription, eye movement tracking and predictive behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction model.”

On that note, we invite you to share your own predictions. Will you be “reading” next week’s AIM Group blogs through an embedded optical display? Adding comments via telepathy? Drop us a line, or better yet, blast us a thought message through inter-tube-whatever they’ll call it in 2010. See you on the other side…

Download the full report PDF.