In the Future

There will be no mass production of any considered worth. We shall all have meaningful, bespoke experiences, which engage us to a suitable level.


This is why I work in digital.

Banner ads can fuck off.

They are Watching

A while ago Ade pointed out his (in my opinion) well deserved anger at the Met Police coming out with this bullshit:



I know... I know... it's in our best interest. But what happens when you want to take nice photos of architecture in London and find yourself carted away by a SWAT team?

Well... here's a response, right near Dare, our friend Banksy has deposited this little gem, near the Post Office on Newman Street.




I'm wondering.... are we racing towards:

The Future is Getting Closer.

Like Photoshop, but running from a browser?

The nice people over at Aviary are developing a suit of browser run replacements for the disgusting monopolies that the likes of Adobe, Microsoft and Apple have over the creative applications market.

Aviary is a suit of web based applications that will allow creative professionals, and those who just like to play, access to powerful image, music and video manipulating tools. In English? It's like Photoshop but it ain't by Adobe init. It's like the Google Word Processor, for images. I'm very excited by all this.

Why am I excited by this?

For me this is NOT Web 3.0 (fuck buzzwords), but it is a refreshing conceptual step away from that awful mental model of the web as taught to us by the powers that be back in the late 90's.

Let's reiterate:

The internet is NOT something that we "Go Onto".
The Net is a set of interlinking routes of data - connections (like in your brain)
The Net is everywhere, all around us, every minute of every day.
The Net is wireless.

Therefore:

We View the Net through the rendering tools we choose (be this a desktop computer - rendering a big HTML page, or through a mobile phone (just showing me my text email).

The Net is MORE powerful than my desktop machine; therefore it makes sense that the net hosts my number crunching image manipulation programs. Physical Geography is no longer an obstacle.

The Net is smarter than I am, so why don't I work openly to it, collaboratively - as there's always other like minded people plugged in else where in the grid.

In the future

Will search be search? Surely the system will know you better than you know yourself and the information you crave will find it's way to you before you even go looking for it.

Flo makes an interesting point; that everything, every discreet piece of data (the time for debating the philosophy behind what we could constitute as a 'discreet piece of data' is not one to be debated at this time) will have it's own ip address. The mind starts to buckle imagining this concept and so we are forced to again reverse the role of cognitive data searching.

I am drowning in emails, yet my email application only lets me search for emails "sent from", "sent to" and, "subject containing". What if I want to search my email for a keyword I wrote in a mail to one of my work colleagues last year before summer some time. The technology is there to enable me to run some sort of search; however it has not yet been turned around to read the context within which I am working and present me the data based on second guessing what I need, when.

Web 2.0 - what a waste of time.

I am my Twitter

I am my Facebook Status Update

I am my Flickr Photos

I am a the time wasted updating all of these things.

Current Web 2.0 works reactively, not pro-actively. Humans are proactive in nature and so our favorite Buzz system is in fact contrary to our very being. Web 2.0 is always playing catch up.

I open a browser tab and fire up Facebook. I see the updates from my friends and work mates, however they are all 2 hours behind as I am still at work at quater past 7. I need a system which lets me know what they are up to at any given time, when I glance it.

I need location aware. I need the system to offer me what I want based on proxemics as well as preferences.

I want my favorite bar to remember how many times I have visited it, and to remember that on Fridays I like to drink Mojitos. Why do I wait for service if the bar could know that I was heading there before I walked through the door.

I want ubiquitous technology to enable my lifestyle; to allow me to dig deeper into every second of every day. I want a virtual world to exist under the skin, under the surface of this real palpable world. I want to see through this surface and interact with a world beyond. I don't want to think about this; as a bilingual person dosen't think as they switch languages half way through a conversation.

I want more than 2.0