Want to change your thinking? Starting looking at the world from different places and different viewpoints. How do you do that? Start doing different things to put you in those different places.
Change now. Do the unexpected. Be quirky. Be daring. Be adventurous.
That simple act of turning left one day, instead of continually turning right, could change your entire life and take you places you’ve never imagined.
I stumbled off a path well travelled, blindly exploring with interest, and stumbled upon an exciting find that I know has always been waiting here for me to find it. I’ve seen glimpses of this place before from casual glances off the path, barely seeing it through the foliage around me and not quite sure of what it was until now.
I will repeat what I said before. The future is not so much about a change of technology as about a change of thinking.
Do you remember back to when you were a kid and it seemed like every day was an adventure? You’d wake up in the morning ready to explore the world and go outside to see and do things that you didn’t do the day before. It was almost as though you were in a constant state of change because, in actually fact, you were. You were learning, evolving, and growing.
Now fast forward to today? How many people can actually truly say that they feel the same way that they did as a kid? Are you doing something different every day? Are you walking off the beaten track or are you still walking down it on autopilot, not even aware of that groove in the ground that you’ve worn away in taking it every day?
Aha! Scott Rosenberg reveals the real origins of Web 2.0. It’s a marketing ploy by the corporate Business 1.0 world to blow some hot air hype into the Web balloon again. He’s has a good point though. I really do hope people have their new Bullshit Detector 2.0 glasses on to notice “the next super-cool but not-quite-usable-yet Web applications”. And I think the words “not-quite-usable” speak volumes here. Hell, forget about Web 2.0, I’d settle for Usability 0.5.
Jason Kottke talks about the importance of still having applications that you can use offline, even though most of the industry is pushing towards online applications. He has a very good point and one that I’d like to expand upon using the comparison to your existing computer’s RAM memory, virtual memory, and disk storage space. In the future, I see our computers as being the RAM and virtual memory of Web 2.0 with the Web itself being the disk storage space. In effect, when we work and save our applications, they will be saved to our hard drive but more as a “disk cache”. As soon as Internet network activity is established your computer will synchronize this data with your online storage space automatically without you having to do anything. That way, if you don’t have your computer, you can still access and work with any of your data at any computer that has the same applications upon it (just by logging in).
I can’t help but think about what David Seah said about wanting to eventually develop his own products instead of focusing just on services. I feel exactly the same way. Don’t get me wrong though, the feeling you get when you actually help someone is a great feeling but therein lies the problem. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want your help, no matter how badly they may appear to need it. That company or person has to be willing to want your help first and trust in your experience and knowledge before you can help them.
Obviously companies like 37signals are a great example of companies who’ve switched from services over to selling a product. However, a little closer to home, I remember admiring a local carpenter who does the same thing. Instead of running his own shop where he may have to create custom work for clients, he works out of his garage building what he likes and then turns around and sells those pieces to other stores for them to sell. He may not make as much money but he loves what he does because he works whenever he wants, vacations whenever he wants, and builds whatever he wants (like an artist). I always thought if I could create my own product in this same way, I’d be in heaven. Again, yes, you’re not making as much money but as long as I had enough to live a comfortable life, I’d be happy.
Why can’t web designers and developers get together (and I think the 9rules network would be a perfect community to tackle this with the three amigos of Business Logs, Scrivs, Rundle, and Oliphant, spearheading the effort) to create a “Don’t Make Me Think” or XPLANE type of website geared for clients to help them understand the entire design process in extremely simple terms and why each aspect/role of the job (i.e. usability, information architecture, design, etc) is critical and important to the success of it. That way when someone wants to develop a web site, they can see what they should be doing and what information they should be collecting BEFORE they even approach a web company to do their site for them or even to gather a team to build something themselves. That way if a client approaches them without this knowledge, they can just point them to the site as an introduction to the design process (not to mention a great knowledge base to refer to if the client asks a question about something, such as “What’s wrong with having a flaming logo?”). I think if something like this was ever developed, it would be the keystone that would support the enter web development industry and make every developer’s job so much easier.
Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games just said the following on his blog.
If I had the necessary funding at this point, it’s straight forward: I’d go looking for a good database guy, a couple of good PHP programmers comfortable with Linux, and so on.
I was really hoping to volunteer for this project but since I just read the above (which indicates Greg’s greatest priority as finding backend people), I wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole. I’m not even going to comment on why this gives me a bad feeling because if you’ve done professional web development work, you’ll know why already. Sorry been there, done that. All the best to him though on his endeavor.
Jason Kottke wants to see mobile phones that allow you to quickly “ping” someone with tiny predefined messages, such as letting your wife know that you are leaving work now and on your way home (i.e. Message from Jason Kottke: I’m leaving work). Yes, you can do this now with SMS but he wants the ability to press a few quick keys (i.e. two or three strokes) to send the message off quickly without having to type it out every time.
What Jason is talking about here is something very similar to what I’ve discussed before. Situational awareness. With situation awareness all that you are doing is making the other person (or persons) aware of what is going on with you at that moment. That’s it. There is no ongoing discussion or dialogue. Think of it like a heart rate monitor that lets you know that person is ok by letting out a “ping”.
In Jason’s example that he used above, instead of relaying typical predefined messages, what if you constructed your message with a few strokes instead? For example, what if he had ten predefined locations and ten predefined events. So say he wants to tell his wife he’s leaving the office. All he does is press the [PING] key, then his [LEAVING] event key then his [OFFICE] location key and the message is instantly sent (assuming it is defaulted to her). I mean if you really wanted to get technological (and a little big brother-ish), RFID technology could even do this for you. For example, if you are not at work but walk into the office, the RFID chip that you left at your office desk would tell your cellphone of your change in location which means you are [ARRIVING] there at the [OFFICE] and that message could be sent automatically. Of course, the wife could set this ping to have no audible tone but instead just show the last location and event. That way if she is wondering where you are at the moment she can look at her cellphone to see that you are [DRINKING] [PUB] and know that you are hard at work. 🙂
Actually what I find interesting about this “awareness tagging” is the possibilities of using it elsewhere, such as on the Web. Imagine if everyone broadcasted these awareness tags for different things and there were awareness aggregators out there that collected information and displayed it in a variety of different ways. An example I gave before in a previous post was making people aware of your daily mood (i.e. happy, sad, etc). As I indicated before, imagine if an awareness aggregator collected these tags from everyone and displayed them in different ways. So you could see what the daily mood of the world would be. Or maybe you could see the mood by country with a tiny dot representing you on the world map. Or what about other awareness tags? What about if an organization wanted to start an awareness campaign about supporting a worthy cause? Imagine if they told you to use a specific awareness tag on your site to indicate your support for the cause and then everyone with that tag was shown on the awareness aggregator site via a world map. You could see all the people around the world that cared about something specific. Or, from a different approach, you could see all of the people in the world who disagreed with an ideology or government approach. It would be like a virtual walk on a government building in that you could see the number and diversity of people from all over who came together to make a stand for or against something.
It looks like Everybody 2.0 and their Dog 2.0 is coming up with another 2.0 buzzword similar to Web 2.0. I guess I’ll add to the party and talk about the cultural paradigm shift that is occurring right now and call that Culture 2.0. Hopefully when this is completed we will have Society 2.0, not to mention Business 2.0 (for real this time!), where people will actually have Compassion 2.0 for one another and works towards a better World 2.0. Did I miss anything…2.0?