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Tim O'Reilly Points Toward Next 'Killer App'
santos_douglas writes "Extreme Tech has this article in which Tim O'Reilly, the man behind every geeks favorite tech manuals, points toward four major leading indicators that will predict the next likely 'killer app' to emerge from the hacker community. They are: (1) Amazon.com web services (2) BARWN (3) Hardware hackers and (4) online gaming communities."
Why didn't he include big, sexy beowulf clusters? Or plans to slashdot the world?
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
Uh huh. QuakeNet (Currently ~150,000 users) has been going since Quake came out in '96. I think Tim's a little slow on the uptake there. (Disclaimer, I'm an operator on QuakeNet)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Were gonna have a huge mass of incompatible hardware with lots of advertising for products on amazon, gonna be wireless with one of the standards making it only usuable in one part of the bay and will actually be made to play online games with. ha ha ha, actually that sounds a lot like modern laptops if you outfit them completely.
Checking out my form of escapism.
"next major breakthrough", it's in about a 1/3 of the emails I receive every day! There must be lots of breakthroughts and killer apps out there, after all email doesn't lie. In fact, right now the wife's up to double d, using some of that money from dead nigerian presidents, we're on vacation on that free offer to barbadoes, and don't even ask what's down my pants these days!
No, there is only one killer app everyone really wants and needs. It's the killer app that kills spam...
I saw a lot of "yeah-technology" arguments about where grass-roots development is happening. But having access to buying things from amazon ubiquitously in my daily life.... don't need it or want it... does anyone? Gaming communities... maybe... let's see what happens to doom III mods at the end of the year... Wireless Networking... I like to go for walks to enjoy nature, not to focus on some digital device... Does anyone really see a killer app here?
Fnord.sig
gnutella-style non-centralized encrypted file-sharing thing with full irc-style-chat and superduper intelligent dynamic node management type stuff to regulate the network.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
the real innovation occuring in the industry - at least right now - is in the data mining field...
"(1) Amazon.com web services (2) BARWN (3) Hardware hackers and (4) online gaming communities." add up to?
A wireless internet virtual reality gaming chair in which everything, including the chair part, is patented up the wazoo.
Tim, can't you do better than to promote an organization that uses the patent office to steal our future? Is freedom that trivial to you?
...Like BitTorrent.
It's a bit difficult to think of distributed services being for anyone other than uber-geeks and people who desperately need processing power. We've been doing distributed number crunching for a few years now, so it's only a matter of time before distributed services take hold. Distributed downloading, which was started by the various P2P apps and has been almost perfected by BitTorrent is the next iteration of that. Imagine what the next iteration of this tech will bring. Imagine hosting your entire website off of your own computer, but as part of a 'distributed' web with a browser Torrent plugin to make bandwidth seem thicker and easier to come by.
Other distributed services are just around the corner.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
And singles are the driver of Album sales (albeit a loss leader) and priced at the stupidly low levels that they can be set at on a medium like the Internet (99 cents has been mentioned) that is well within the means of teenagers everywhere.
I think this will be a virtuous circle of people putting the singles directly onto iPod mp3 players and the like and then going back for more. This could really change the whole nature of Album sales (often containing more than a couple of duff tracks to make up the numbers) and providing the mechanism for download is both strong enough to be profitable and not too strong as to irritate customers then they could have a winner. Both for the music companies and the Internet as a whole...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
.
O'Reilly - Amazon.com Web Services Nutshell
O'Reilly - Essential BARWN
O'Reilly - Hardware Hackers Pocket Reference
O'Reilly - Online Gaming The Definitive Guide
The next killer application for the internet will be govermental spyware for control of the masses.
Welcome to the beautiful world of mind control probes.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Has someone been reading /.
"Tim Oreilly tries to promote next conference.."
of hearing Tim O'Reilly's monologues. The most annoying thing about them is how he's been verbally sex0ring amazon for the last few YEARS. Stick to running your company, Tim--there are plenty of other people in the world who can write musings about amazon if they want.
This whole social fixation on the next big thing is stupid and counter productive. About the only thing this achieves is liberates money from those stupid enough to buy in and into those lacking morals and ethics.
case modding is about as much hardware hacking as putting a giant tail on your honda civic is hot rodding.
I'll just say the current generation of microcontrollers is a dream to work with, and programmable logic is really hot right now too...
foog (who has been up all night with an Atmel AVR, and the blinkenlights are flashing and the solenoid valves are clacking and everything's worked as designed so far, just with the usual minor hitches...)
I'm still hoping someone will re-think HyperCard as an Internet-optimised operating system, with integrated scriptable modules for creating and viewing webpages, images, email, multimedia, etc.
If it runs as slick as HyperCard, it should become the new basic minimum of computer-literacy, so a creative community would inevitably grow up around it.
Build it on top of Linux and offer it for Internet Appliances, and it could put Microsoft out of business. But wireless and web-services and multiplayer gaming don't seem central to me, at all.
...the next true killer app is one I've been waiting for, for some time now.
Micro-payments!
Broadband + VOIP that can connect to other phone networks.
In car entertainment, based on a PC with 802.11b (download from the house) that plays mp3's with something like GDAM for real time, hands free mixing.
Better Gnutella/Kazaa that allows things like downloading from people with only part of the file.
And finially, a fully modular UI. so that when I install libjpeg and libogg on my PC, anything that can provide a bitmap makes use of libjpeg and anything that can provide a RIFF file makes use of ogg.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I guess if Amazon do get the next big thing then they will just patent it to lock it into themselves. You've got to love the American Patent System, not sure if they are any better ones though
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
nasa space sofware. killer app. columbia.
I don't know what the killer app is going to be, but the next consumer killer app is going to involve the fact that we are reaching critical density on the number of homes that have permanent, fast internet connections. This definitely changes the way people deal with, and perceive the network, and should enable some new services that were unthinkable with dial-up. And it won't just be networked gaming...
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
...is going to become more mainstream in my opinion. Some of those cases at the hardware hacker website looked nice. Heck, if Harry Potter had a PC, it would look like this.
Just my PC-with-a-magical-core's-worth.
RickTheWizKid
There has been a noticable increase in broadband usage in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto, as quarantined or frightened tech workers stay at home and telecommute. SARS, the next killer app.
Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:
Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online
Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)
Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.
I didn't say that Amazon web services, BARWN, Xbox hardware hacking, or MMORPGs were "the next killer app." What I said was that all these things were on my radar, and why. My point was not to pick the most important things out there, but to pick four things that people might not view in the same context, and to identify the common element that put them on my radar: They represent the hacker impulse, people pushing the boundaries of a system and coming up with innovations that the original creators didn't imagine. I outlined some of the key elements that put technologies on my radar: hackability, being in line with some major trend (such as the increase in ubiquitous networking), disruptive potential, grassroots enthusiasm rather than top-down corporate promotion but still the presence of professional practitioners and a possible business ecology.
There are many other technologies that are also on my radar. I chose these four to highlight precisely because they seem so disjoint, yet to me show all of the characteristics that I outlined above, the characteristics that make a technology worth following by O'Reilly.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com
Oh....how brilliant
(1) Amazon.com web services
No kidding? A publisher giving kudos to one of his largest outlets? What a suprise.
(2) BARWN
Wireless. The NEXT big thing? I thought this was the LAST big thing?
(3) Hardware hackers
Interesting. And what a pisser this will be.
(4) online gaming communities
Seriously, has this guy been awake for the last 2 years?
Only victims make excuses
I don't think they will ever get the latency low enough for that.
Yes!
Micro-payments, if-and-when they become widely acceptable, will make so many things possible it boggles the mind. The internet is sitting about where the brick-and-mortar (or at the time, cloth-and-tentpole) economy sat before the invention of money: when all trade is barter, many mutually advantageous transactions don't occur because the overhead cost is too high. If all you have to pay with are goats, and you want to buy something worth a milli-goat, what to you do?
Online creditcard payments are the goats of the internet.
-- MarkusQ
People who have written killer apps are the people whom Tim O'Reilly should seek out and enlist to write articles about killer apps. I myself have written a killer app, one which has been responsible for selling millions of computers worldwide and which is in use by tens of millions of people every day. My prediction, one which I am working on daily to bring to fulfillment, is really the blossoming of a very old idea, that we will soon see new types of terminal software which makes it unnecessary for individuals to have personal computers and which allows them to have access to any kind of computer-based services which are available over the network. This will not be a killer app per se, but rather a will be the era in which software as a broadcasted service to wireless terminal displays will predominate. No, I'm not a geek. Yes, I've got the track record to prove that I know what I'm talking about. Yes, the mold is broken.
BT is an amazingly powerful bit of technology. To see it at work try torrentse.cx. Its main disadvantage?!?
It has to be handled thru a plugin. Imagine the savings if this HTML worked: <IMG SRC="/very_big_image.jpg.torrent">
Yeah, it works! (Red Hat 9 ISOs so soon were a miracle!)
But the Moz guys need to incorporate Torrent tech directly into the browser! That's serve as a huge wakeup call to IE, and we might see a new feature for the first time in NNN years...
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'd like to see a way of cleaning up and populating my reading list using the Amazon API, so I've written a small python script that works in straightforward cases -- no heuristics for correcting mistaken titles or author names and such. fun with xml and booklists
(article doesn't seem to mention any)
my guess list...
mp3/file sharing?
java?
web-browsers?
perl?
inter-networking?
bulletin boards?
spread-sheets?
tex/word-processors?
basic?
unix?
databases?
video-games?
linkers?
debuggers?
compilers?
assemblers?
ballistic modelling?
decryption?
--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?-- TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR?--TRR!
Copies of technical books, offered unrestricted over p2p networks. Now that sounds exciting!
Well, I'm not sure we will ever see them. It seems most businesses who have anything to do with the internet are busy. Patent fraud. Finding new ways to abuse copyright infringement claims. Sueing everyone.
Don't forget the internet mail order companies--they want to be able to charge you retail, and insane shipping & handling rates. If everyone could buy books, pictures, short video clips for 25 cents, then there would be less purchases of those $30 hardback books, $20 videos, and $10 pictures (together with a $8 shipping fee).
Big business could easily develop a micropayment system, but micropayments don't help big business.
I have seen a few micropayment systems floating around, but they all seem to have nasty quirks. One based upon gold requires you start out with a initial investment of thousands of dollars. I don't know if there is a real micropayment solution or not.
If data is all you want to trade, then perhaps one based on real money is not the solution. What about one where "thought money" (for the lack of a better word) is traded. Make up a currency system where this "money" is traded for pics, stories, and whatever. This sounds so simple, I wouldn't be surprized if there are sites which already do this...
'vi' mode for mozilla text edit boxes. That would be a good idea... but I want an "amaya" mode.
And IF it must be a 'vi' mode, at least 'emacs'!!!
But my main point is RIGHT on... richer editing functions from within html forms... it would be a godsend for so many of these web form front ends. (e.g. I've been using Zope for some stuff and I would love this... the problem with an amaya front end being you edit HTML fragments... so a vi or emacs mode would cover more ground.
-pyrrho
Micropayments is one of those technologies, like rocket backpacks, that techno-nerds keep promoting but which never show up, and for the same reason. They're not practical.
The Teledon project back in the 1970s used micro-payments, and failed. Project Xanadu was going to be financed by micropayments and failed. Nicholas Negroponte predicted that micropayments would finance the WWW. First Virtual founded an internet bank based on micropayments and went bankrupt.
The problem is that the cost of administering any micro-payment scheme overwhelms the value of the service provided; all the money goes to the payment administrator and comparatively little goes to the content provider. Content providers hate them.
Users hate them too. They add another layer of cost and complexity to internet transactions. Users prefer to pay one bill each month, or whatever, and download whatever they want without having to keep track of every individual piece. Micropayments break that.
They don't even work for the service providers. Now they have to account for every individual service they provide. How much do they charge for this message? For a page? For an image? What if the user browses without loading images? What if they only read half the page and demand a refund for the half they didn't read?
Ignoring all the problems with micropayments, it doesn't even provide any solutions. Will it stop piracy? No. Will it bring back the glory days of the Internet bubble? No. Will it provide services that users want they didn't have before? No.
Micropayments have all kinds of problems and offer no benefits, except to techo-cheerleaders who imagine themselves getting paid for content no one is willing to spend money on.
This idea was all the rage in the late nineties. Many people I know who had similar qualifications (maybe you are one of them?) went off to make thier fortune in next big wireless thin client thing. All of them fell into a black hole never to be heard of again 'cept as an anonymous coward.
DVD Jones
Personally I love their web services, easy to use, plenty of information. They have some areas to improve such as switching out ASINs, not including an 'image not found' image, but overall I'm very pleased.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
that the technologies mentioned above WON'T be the next killer app! Predicting such thing is like lotteries: virtually nobody guesses them right; and none of the people you know personally win.
Some work has gone into AI-based investing, and it is fascinating to think about computers picking stocks. A little scary too, but if analysis of securities is a viable means to make money in the market (it's arguable), a computer should be able to process all the information and make timely picks far better than any bloodskull.
Yep, micropayments are not practical at all.
It's pretty simple to work this out. Ask yourself how much is your phone bill? Let's say you only pay twenty bucks a month. Well, what exactly are you paying for here? Most people don't want to believe that they are paying for the billing infrastructure itself, but then you have to ask yourself exactly what does the billing infrastructure include? You can argue till dawn about the details, but I think a very reasonable argument can be made that more than half of your bill is simply to pay for the billing infrastructure if you include the hardware necessary to track the charges, the billing department itself and the associated labor as well as the service time spent arguing with the customers about billing problems over the phone, in the office and in court. The customer pays for these things. That's the name of the game. Bandwidth and equipment are not the primary cost to the phone company, the billing infrastructure and the associated services including the legal department necessary for settling fee disputes certainly is.
Micropayments are not the answer. No payment is the answer. If you think money is the answer to all of life's problems then perhaps you shouldn't be focusing on the web.
The Net rather. I meant the Net.
is it necessary then, to only be able to apply the term 'killer app', if i understand it correctly, to things allready in past tense? i say that audio via p2p is a killer app - but wait...at what point did it/will it become so? when napster first came out? when napster was taken down and replaced by gnutella/whoever else? or is it yet to come when we can, as stated elsewhere in this thread[i'm really sorry i'm not linking- im still new with this linux thing and i havent yet figured howt he copy/paste works yet :/ but kudos for the reference]...have encrypted, untracable, distributed bandwidth/peer2peer service with highbandwidth and whatnot---in a sense being able to download anything, [specifically movies, music & media] for free, at any time, in moments. this, if realized i'd say would be amongst the 'killer apps'...but wait...? when will we say it is...? will it be when the Riaa/mpaa are thrown into the obscurity of western history? will it be when jack vilente[sp?] and the people in charge of the riaa are burned at the stake? or will it be when all computers [or 90%? or 80%?] that are not servers providing infrostructure use it? when we see a group of powerful, non-political[ie, not run by the USian corporate government...[ unification servers providing requests from one network to another[ie, running limewire, search
ing for 'the goat next door - twelve and a half bar goats' and finding it on a client running off of a kazaa client?
when, if at all, is p2p to be accepted amongts these killer apps? or have i, in my ignorance, missed the point, and p2p has been a killer app for some time now?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
WWII Online
Ok, I agree that's cool from a geek perspective, but I fail to see it as a "killer app" which will appeal to the public at large.
Killer app of 2004/05 or so is...
P2P Neural Net AI. Yep, distributed peer-to-peer AI, that you can tap into at will, for pretty much anything, which utilizes the resources of millions of computers. Think of it as a P2P SETI@Home, but with each processing node "talking" to any other.
Except it'll have to be a virus, because by then, the "authorities" will have banned anything that powerfull that isn't military.
I have been using SpamAssassin for 6 months and I still have 20-30 messages a day get through. There is no amount of filtering in the world that can stop all spam. We need to rethink the who concept of how email works and I think that has been done by TMDA http://www.tmda.net.
This last week alone I got 1349 SPAM messages, SpamAssassin caught about 1000 but only one SPAM got through TMDA. Not to mention there was no legit email lost.
I have now turned off SpamAssassin for good since it is no longer necessary.