Weblogsky: The future will be streamed to the personal device of your choice

« The future's back there | Main | Meteor followup »

The future will be streamed to the personal device of your choice

Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? – posted at Yahoo! questions, and answered at length by Leonard Lin. First he considers what's changed since 2001:

No iPod/ITMS
No Cameraphone
No Satellite Radio
Blogging not mainstream
Very little social media (Flickr, YouTube)
No social networking sites
No Wikipedia
MMORPGs just taking off

He notes that most of these were happening five years ago, but among early adopters. (Today's fringe is tomorrow's future.)

So what's hot in five years? Leonard has a good list (here with my own comments):

Software as a service becomes more standard. This has actually been a long time coming – consider the experimentation with the ASP (application service provider model) in the 90s. One question: to what extent will we trust the SAAS operators to hold critical data. I already find myself depending on Google and 37 Signals quite a bit, and I know other early adopters who are beginning to build their information environment with external services rather than local software and databases.
Global identity framework, referred to by some as "Identity 2.0." This is a standard way to manage your identity and personal data online, precursors of which were W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences and Microsoft's Passport. There's a bunch of people working on this.
Digital Media – more and more of it, some cheap and some free, carried on many gadgets of many sizes, with wireless access to sync and stream effortlessly.
Smart phones. Leonard says that phones will be the primary convergence devices in five years, though you might say that the primary convergence devices will includes voice communication of some kind, and increasingly advance positioning systems.
RFID and spimes or network objects. These should take off once people get over the privacy paranoia... like it's threatening for the FBI to know where you've put your socks.
Self monitoring or self instrumentation. Nike Plus is a good example: "tune your run." This is very cyborg, and we saw it coming in the early 90s (e.g. Menstat).
Personal aggregators, or what Marc Canter calls Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. Marc notes that Apple and Microsoft are already moving on the concept.
Shared everything... or online environments that promote sharing. I would add that the "consumer" is dead, replaced by the more active customer-as-collaborator.

Another piece that's not explicit in Lin's list: the rise of game culture and the communities that form in game-driven environments (and avatar-based communities like Second Life). I already know people whose social life is built around systems like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Runescape et al. And these games are more than places to hang out; they actually teach new ways of thinking. Example: at a recent conference, David Pearce Snyder noted that gamers are more tolerant of failure, because they have to fail so many times to move to higher levels of a game.

jon posted this at 12:21 PM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend