For the last few days, I was on sort of mountain retreat (it wasn’t really that glamorous), during which I listened to a LOT of podcasts and a lot of audio books and audio book summaries.
One of the most interesting and entertaining things I listened to was Bruce Sterling’s presentation from one of those goofy O’Reilly conferences.
Some of you may be aware of my nascent efforts to ridicule the Web 2.0 hype while provoking some actual thought about what the future of the Web might look like. Bruce Sterling expresses very well some of what irritates me so much about “Web 2.0” and also quotes extensively from an interview with Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, who is highly critical of “Web 2.0” as a way to describe the current state of the Web. This is all great stuff.
Another main topic of Bruce’s keynote was the idea of “The Internet of Things” — the term he uses to describe a future time when physical objects are tied into the Internet. The standard example used to explain the benefits of this is “imagine using google to find your shoes in the morning”. Bruce says that he thinks it will take 30 years for the “Internet of Things” to truly arrive. I disagree. I predict that it will take 1/3 as long. I suspect that even my estimate is too pessimistic, though. I also predict that it won’t be google that people are using, but something much better.
You don’t find bathrooms poorly cleaned by teenage boys glamorous? Sheesh!
The “Internet of Things” idea reminds me of our mutual friend Molly S.’s masters thesis for Information Design or whatever her degree is in. It was a virtual memory box for kids, which both held the objects and provided a way to index and search them. Or something like that. I didn’t quite get it at the time. But perhaps it turns out that she is a visionary.