Humanity doesn’t have a goal. But humans do. Humanity didn’t set a course for itself. But humans do, everyday.
I don’t know if our future is Star Trek or Mad Max-like. I don’t even know how much of a future we have, if it won’t be controlled by some robots we’ll create and who’ll decide we’re better batteries than creatures. But I can take a guess at what should happen on your desktop and your browser in the next few years, using the same equation with humans and humanity. Huh.
MSN, Twitter, Facebook, Google and your Operating System
The first 4 are proof, unless you’re Fox Mulder and know better, that we’re not alone. The latter, therefore, is our friend that connects us to the world from any device - desktop PC, mobile phone, car, whatever.
Well, rethink your OS with social networking built-in and imagine you can filter what goes to and comes from the Internet using your network’s knowledge.
37signals, microformats, Microsoft, Apple and the Linuxes
If you haven’t thoroughly tested 37signal’s latest, Highrise, you can’t imagine the future of email: it’s tending to seemless integrate with your way to organize data.
Now that you can integrate any conversation with your date in your social-networking-enabled OS, you have a whole new world for data management and productivity, resulting from communication.
Second Life, Google Earth and IBM
Throw all this inside a 3D interface, and you have the new Internet. You’ll boot up your computer and you will be “there”, wherever that is.
Broadband, mobile networks, WiFi, WiMax and the content creators
The battle for your phone/internet/tv bill will end-up in full subscription-based models, covering everything you do on the Internet: from your connection to your online music consumption.
Because you’ll always be connected, there’s even a chance your devices will be attached to that bill. Need I remind you that 2/3 of the population can’t pay for a computer upfront?
Concluding
My conclusion’s a bit sad : innovation in the Valley is dead, community is just another capitalist word, the big companies have won again by adapting.
I shouldn’t be sad because it means we won. The concepts of open source, community and transparence are industry standards. Yey!
So what’s next?
Along with the community, I’m off to help small things be efficient, eventually release my own Linux distribution and try and bridge the global village for the responsible humans we are.
Hopefully, at the end of each day, it’ll add up to a better humanity?
Powered by factory-integrated social-network-enabled freedom of choice, speech and reach. Sexy, huh?