On the way to perfect computing

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The Next Big Thing will come soon. It’s not here yet but it’s close.

Let’s consider symptoms:

– it was growing number of Web 1.0 users who read the web. Also there was small group of content authors who published stuff. Actually these numbers constantly keep growing even now. Less developed countries keep joining a club.

– Web 2.0 has come. Readers got new skills and started content contribution. This happen due to such services as YouTube, Flickr and others. Basic idea is moving “off-line activties” to online ones: it started with searching for information in Google instead of regular library and shopping on eBay instead of regular stores. It countinued with photo and video sharing, one map usage, shopping, etc. Everything around you is moving and becomes virtual.

This era is a time of CONTENT. It brings content online. Also it brings your content from your desktop -> online, always available and portable one.

Those Web 2.0 providers are cool who managed move some kind of my content on-line and made it useful. Flash video perfecly works for video assets, and it’s quety easy to implement pattern “publish once, read as much as you want”. Basically we don’t edit videos on our desks. Images too.

Google and other competitors try hard to move documents online, but they are not there yet.

Guys from www.scribd.com are on the right track, but they don’t swim against stream and also use “publish once…” model. So, let’s wait for appropriate tool for docs, maybe Adobe with the help of Flash will give it to us. Btw, as time shows Flash(Silverlight?) is a good technology to use to move some stuff from desktop machine – online. Our computers become thin clients as the time goes.

Content can be moved online also from our cells, not only desks. QIK is an example. They let you translate video stream from your cell directly to web site. They keep your archive of translated videos.

Interesting, what determins a nature of these transformations? Basically it’s technology, you can say. It’s a broad topic. I think I’ll write a separate post on it.

– The Next Big Thing era .

Yeah, you can start enumerate a number of already existing services proving that I’m wrong and we already have it.

Basically I would, If I would wrote its name in low case. So, let’s talk about It.

One of remarkable pioneers here is Facebook. Why is it so successful? Yeah, it’s not a chemistry and there is no exact formula for that. Initially, it was an equation with man unknowns, the matter of time and place.

But it all began with The Model. Yeah, the idea was defined by students. Recommend for everyone to google it and read. But look how it works:

The first step is to make connections and create a skeleton. Then, you can grow a meat. It’s very interesting point here, but let’s make a short break and talk about sharing services. Btw, how many dozens of sharing <put you label here> services are present in our world? How many of them have you ever used? Hum…not that match.

- But why?

- Basically, because I’m doing my stuff using H software on Y OS, and to share a file with  collegue I need to go to our corporate portal, but when I’m at home….

Yeah, we need to understand the cause that makes people share stuff and why they pick one tool or another.

The following leads to it:

* personal activities: here they use their address book or contact list and tools around close enough to *send* information to recepient.

* work activities: business processes. Toolset is usually complex, you don’t like your corporate app as it is old, ugly and slow, yeah, that’s why you prefer using emails.

In both cases you look at your contacts, pick a necessary one, and send info to recipient. That’s it. So, Facebook is your contact list, that doesn’t make sense without your friends sharing vacation photos and other stuff. You can share anything, it’s a matter of external application available.

Truly, they did a great job in gathering user base and now you don’t need to hold a long list of passwords to different sites and frequently use “remind me passw.” link anymore.

But the clear model was first – just get in touch with our class-mates, collegues, etc.

So, the idea is not new – The Next Big Thing will be Web OS. When all your data online, all services online,all your friends online, and you need portable devices and unlimited bandwidth to use it.The revolution is comming,  we already can see Amazon, Microsoft and Google holding their weapons not so far.