Thursday, May 01, 2008

the Net going forward

in answer to a question someone asked about the future of the Internet;


The future will be more of the same as well as what's old is new again. Recall, when "dumb terminals" were all the rage... That's where we are heading back to (think Cloud computing).

More of the same refers to more collaborative activities (Crowd Sourcing,etc). Lastly think more Convergence... Just a year or two back the buzzword du jour was "Mash-ups", and referred to adding data to a google map... Now, and more and more often a Mashup might be combining three or more applications to create a new solution (ie- Google Maps, Geo Tagging, Flickr, and a social network gives you a virtual tourist solution that tells you about where you are, and what you are looking at. Add GPS, and it is a real time tour guide).

Convergence is also only constrained by "faster,cheaper,smaller" type factors. As example, we would not be able to have had GPS enabled phones only a few years ago. This is because the GPS chip was to big, and battery drain to much. Nowadays almost every new smart phone contains a GPS chip, and battery life is no longer an issue.

Open source (and api's) is only in its infancy, and as that trend progresses, ultimately everything will talk / integrate with everything... Then it will get really fun.

The "pipe" also continues to get bigger, and as we are able to move thicker streams of data through the net (i.e. HDTV), this will open up a newer convergence where we finally will have no differentiation between our living room TV and our office PC.

I believe that we will not stop in our innovation, and what the Internet platform can achieve till I can actually hit the send button on my oven, and send my mother a Turkey that I just cooked via the net to her oven.

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