The web has only been around 6,000 days. So Kevin Kelly reminds us in his presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. In the beginning, we thought the web would be “TV only better.” It has evolved into something much different and Mr. Kelly takes a stab at what the web will be 5,000 days from now. “As different from the web (of today) as the web was from TV.”
Here’s what I jotted on my Coffee Zone napkin:
- “If what you create is not on the web, it doesn’t count.”
- “If it can’t be shared, it doesn’t count.”
- In the next 6,000 days everything will move to the Cloud; move to Database and move to Sharing. (He explains in the video)
He ticks off several things that we now take for granted but would have considered impossible at the beginning of the web. Which, of course, means that things we now consider impossible, will be routine in 15 years. I love the idea of “Believing in the impossible.”
Dear Nancy:
Send me a link to your video and I’ll post it here with Mr. Kelly’s.
I can see how this video would inspire some intriguing talking points.
But… And please forgive me in advance for being all Negative Nancy here… this video is terrible. I mean, it’s great to prognosticate, and all respect to old-growth techno-hippies, but what we have here is, in fact, another lucky inheritor of dot-com boom wealth who can afford to talk out of his ass about technology he doesn’t actually do much with hands-on.
Here’s a quick litmus test for these sorts of discussions: You can tell a hands-on user from a douchebag poseur based on the number of times he uses the term “Web 2.0”. Same goes for “the Cloud”. Cloud computing is shorthand for “let’s let somebody else cover the costs of hosting and bandwidth”. As you well know, Steve, the fundamental requirement for anything on the internet is for there to be infrastructure; hardware and bandwidth. What a pain in the ass. Can’t we just pretend there’s a limitless supply for free? Maybe once we convert the moon into computronium.
For the next 10 years, anyway, this is a good way to create a marketplace that does not have any fundamental basis in actual physicality. Think of how it would be if, say, values of real estate were continually inflated for several decades, while at the same time loans to pay for those inflated prices were approved based on ever more flimsy requirements. How’s that working out?
Yes, doing things with databases are good. Yes, deep linking with open formats is very good. Yes, ubiquitous access is super excellent. And, yes, this will probably lead us to a constellation of services collaborating in common formats to provide ubiquitous access to our specific intellectual, social, and entertainment needs. For further reference review anything written by Charles Stross in the last four years. Welcome to the party, pal.
And, by the way, how could have been a web summit when I wasn’t invited? In fact, shouldn’t we all have been there? Interesting that we are so clingy to mass-media notions that there is such a thing as a hierarchy of innovators who can all hang out (of course, in San Francisco) and form a definitive zeitgeist of what will be cool in the next year or two. Sheeeeeeit. Isn’t the web itself the only true web summit? Perhaps I’ll understand things better when my stock options vest and I, too, can afford a house in Pacifica.