Slashdot Mirror
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."
maybe because beowulf clusters are rubbish compared to big web-distributed computing projects.
/. to world.... its a 'killer app', but not in the sense that most people understand it ;-)
Plans to
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.
...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.
"Tim Oreilly tries to promote next conference.."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.