24
Dec
Technology for the masses
We’re not there yet, but in the same way that the initial adoption of the WWW threw out Mosaic, followed by increasingly user-friendly browsers, and then the ability to prepare your own websites with relative ease (I taught myself over the summer of 2006 - admittedly in an intensive summer off - and am assembling my own little empire of sites), so Web 2.0 is becoming increasingly user-friendly, and is about to transform into its next manifestation.
I started playing with the social web a year ago, and while I had a lot of fun, I found it quite frustrating. Now, with a background in CSS and xHtml I am trying again, and this time having a blast that is truly productive. My websites are hosted at GoDaddy, who has a wide array of “value applications” available. These permit easy set up of blogging, forums, database management, etc, on one’s own sites. GoDaddy makes server-side applications straightforward to use. While still a little too esoteric to become a mass commodity, the days of centrally managed blogs are surely numbered!
What will the online world look like when everyone takes on several url’s for their own purpose (owning not IP addresses in lieu of phone numbers, but domain names), and sets one of them up as a blog? No longer will MySpace and Facebook be intermediaries necessary for settin up the communities, but instead individuals will host their blogs with a provider of choice, and only need to announce themselves to a registry such as Technorati as a next-generation-phone book. This has profound impact on not just the way that people interact with each other on line, but also, I suspect, with the way that the advertising market develops. What will the next generation of AdSense look like when the Google network is not business oriented, but is instead tens of millions of individual user blogs?
I am finding the same technological advances in Skype and its ilk to be interesting, though somewhat slower. It is certainly possible to carry one’s laptop (inevitably wi-fi enabled) to Starbucks or the airport and get a connection (for collection of emails as well as conversation, of course), but right now one’s monthly communications bill can be a disaster if one does this too much! A smart alternative for the road warrior is a CDMA PCMCIA card for fixed price connection to the wireless carrier’s network, but this, too, is a little pricey, and is primarily marketed for data. But what happens when a cellular provider equips its phones with Skype, and as part of the PCMCIA package provides software to add voice communications to a laptop, and sniffing capability to find the best, cheapest frequency available.
As Web 3.0 emerges, expect to see all of these geeky behaviors simplify and commoditize until it’s as easy as wiring up your home entertainment center!
