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."

Comments

Online Gaming communities

[Yarn]

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)

A rundown

[screwballicus]

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.

Tim O'Reilly comments on article misrepresentation

[tadghin]

Just to be clear, this report on my "O'Reilly Radar" talk at the Emerging Technologies Conference really missed the point.

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.

BitTorrent holds tremendous potential...

[mcrbids]

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