future of ~the internet~

the big problem is designing formal languages that are expressive enough to capture a broad swathe of information types while still permitting the kind of computation that semantic web dudes dream about

that's always been my assumption too. something could happen where domain-specific taxonomies get traction, and then some of those get interoperability and we have some centers of gravity ... but i don't see what would drive that, especially with everyone trying to lock up their users.

micro sofft thinks the future is clouds lol

people get espn and the weather on their phone and suddenly they forget that you can get that stuff on regular computers or even the television

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, February 22, 2011 2:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

fyi currently US smartphone percentage is something like 30% to say nothing of the rest of the earth which tends to be considerably behind the first world

i'm just sayin

*smartphone PENETRATION percentage

probably higher in east Asia which is where the 21st century is

just sayin

ya'll making out like Twitter and Facebook are here for good, but you just know in five years time everyone will have moved on, and what they'll have moved on to will start off as an underground, non-app supported thing, launched from a straight-up browser. It's always the way of these things.

xp, also higher in europe where mobile phones happened before like 2006 or whenever they first arrived in the U.S.

"It's always the way of these things."

Yeah totes remember when this happened in the 70s.

30% smartphone "penetration" is pretty staggering considering the first smartphone that wasn't a piece of shit was introduced in 2007

Thing starts underground, becomes popular, monitised, adopted by the mainstream, taste-makers move on. This is hardly a new phenomenon. xp

Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on. Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Twitter isn't yet part of everyone in the worlds daily lives, so yeah I can see something taking it over.

Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Will it really though? Facebook is just Twitter + Flickr + email. At least that's how most people use it.

"Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on"

you sound like francis fukuyama. facebook will have plenty of users but negligible cultural/econmic impact in 5-10 years. twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

the importance of facebook as mentioned by somebody in the fb thread is that they got everybody to use their government names xp

an interesting question for me in a post URL world is how will content get passed around. URL shorteners Are heinous. ideally you'd be able to get some kind of preview before you click on it - but so far implementations on blogspot or w/e have been beyond bad.

I got it though - PiP browsing - window inset into your browser gives you a preview when you hover- where's my 10 million dollars VCs

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

!!

Why wouldn't the next thing start as an app? Instagram was app-only at first.

I think the global future is going to be pretty interesting considering smartphones -- and I wonder how long we'll keep using that word, as it smells like mothballs -- are more widely used than computers in some areas and are the primary way some people are using the internet. For anyone who's not in an office in front of a computer, I'd guess that they use the internet a lot more from their phone than they ever do on a desktop or laptop.

We're starting to see more situations like Instagram where it's a matter of determining how the primary mobile use can be extended or enhanced by a full web browser or desktop application.

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

plz expand on this

i mean this is its future: http://twitter.com/bbccomingofage. not that it is going to be overtaken by [self-]promotion but that it is no longer "cool"

i thought the twitter narrative was pointles>gimmicky>useful for certain things>twitter feeds being referred to in news items

referred to in news items = death i think

i mean does anyone seriously think it's going to be around in, say, 10 years? i'm just saying it's going to be quicker than that, i guess.

what's gonna replace it?

i don't know

if i did i would be drinking mountain dew to a soundtrack by trent reznor, not talking to you assholes

when you have a credible* replacement for public communications call me and we'll get some angel funding

*not blogs, tumblr, facebook, etc

not buying the implicit assumption in that that there is a real need or desire for "public communications" of 160 chars that is of interest to any more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population, once the initial craze has died down ca. 2012.

there i said it.

that a lot of people use it (although it's not really that many) does not mean it solves a ubiquitous problem. a lot of people bought tamagotchis.

people didn't use tamagotchis to help organise worldwide political protests tho

1) people didn't use twitter either!

2) rolling revolutions in developing countries is not a business model.

facebook statuses already do everything twitter does

i don't use twitter much myself, but that's because i'm a geek and use an actual rss reader. real people get their links from twitter.

facebook is too oriented around real-world friends and the interface is increasingly awful.

lol at "real people get their links from twitter."

also lots of things help organize worldwide political protests, like way more than twitter does, we just don't hear about them because they aren't "twitter."

there is literally nothing twitter does that facebook can't adapt itself to do better. it's been shifting away from being oriented around real-world friends for a long time now.

twitter is awful and useless imo, only time I ever look at it is when someone links to it

the future is awful and useless

caek, getting/posting links is a lot of the value of twitter for the many, many non-geeks who use it.

i think facebook will die before twitter does. it's just trying to do too many things at once.

i sort of always wondered how exactly rss readers would take over the world. barring some iPad-based miracle it looks like they won't for a while. twitter has that space locked up.

all been downhill since the glory days of compuserve imo

i was just lolling at the idea that twitter users are somehow representative of "real people"

love twitter but trying to rationalise this is a waste of time really. i'd expect it to eventually allow longer tweets just via a 'read more' option anyway. would probably quit facebook if it wasn't for its usefulness just as a social diary.

yeah it would be cool if they allowed longer tweets and also had a 'like' button but then wait it would just be facebook minus everything else facebook can do

i'm lolling at the idea that a usable forum for public communications is some fad

maybe facebook will own it, i dunno. but it's not like twitter is surviving on novelty value.

apparently the future of the internets is some twitter fbook grudge match

who will survive and what will be left of them

i'm lolling at the idea that a usable forum for public communications is some fad

forums for public communications can not be a fad or die ever

yeah seriously, it's possible that in ten years ~neither~ will be around, and what "replaces" them might not look like either.

how will the revolutions organize then though ?! rip political change and human communication : (

will html be around in 10 years

i previously summarised my feelings abt twitter btw

its like i dont understand the conventions, and it feels like boring middleaged ppl figured it out quicker than i did and i'm sick of watching the news and they do their twitter bit and i'm like what? why do ppl on twitter matter. And the stupid fake words its generated are uniformly irritating like what retweet? idk then theres this thing where you're supposed to follow things in realtime now and i'm like what i cant keep up and all of this is gibberish to me.

― plax (ico), Friday, February 4, 2011 9:58 PM (2 weeks ago)