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)

Re:Online Gaming communities

[Dark Lord Seth]

Ah, but being a user to QuakeNet doesn't automagically mean that they all play Quake. I know plenty of people who reg at QuakeNet yet hate Quake itself... They even hate the entire FPS genre, they're on QuakeNet just for fun or other games or what else. I'm not saying Quake isn't popular, but measuring the popularity of it against the number of users on an IRC network is kinda flawed.

Heck, online gaming communities are flawed imho anyways. If I want to game, I want to fly a spaceship and blow up stuff, trading salvages crap and doing whatnot. I want to run around with a big run, shooting people and getting shot myself. I want to run around with WW2 weapons, jump in aircraft and take the battle to the sky! If I just wanted to chat I wouldn't buy the damn game and join a random community instead.

Re:Online Gaming communities

[tprox]

I agree. Tim seems to be lagging behind. As far as games go, with Everquest and Half-Life, the new games to come out need to have something different than the tried-and-true formulas already out there.

It seems that people who want to play games online already are.

For each of those examples, I'm sure you can find multiple examples of the same thing and glaring "WTF's": Amazon front ends downloadable for free? Isn't that basically what Slashcode and a number of other things are? Oh wait, they're not associated with Amazon. Ubiquitous Wireless Networking? Nice for infrastructure, but IMO hardly a killer app. Oh, and don't get me started on the "Alpha Geeks Hardware Hack into the Security of the System".

WTF?!

It's right there in my email

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...

its blatantly gonna be some ultimate

[noogle]

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.

Distributed P2P Services...

[Bonker]

...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.

MUSIC IS THE NEXT KILLER APP

[locarecords.com]

Personally I really believe that music is the next Killer App on the Internet. Now that labels are starting to embrace the technology - and Apples download agreements for the iPod look very very interesting - this will pull people in due to the convenience of getting singles.

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...

Re:MUSIC IS THE NEXT KILLER APP

[stak]

I agree. Downloading music off the internet drives computer sales, high speed internet services, portable music players, car stereos that can play MP3s, CDR & DVDR burners, and blank media sales.

The 10 CDs that I use to buy a year for $140 have been replaced by $40 a month internet service, a $1500 3 year computer replacment cycle, spindles of CDR, and a $600 Pioneer car stereo to listen to my MP3 collection.

I think in the future music will be given away to drive sales of more expensive products. Just like TV shows. Companies give the content away but you still have to buy a $300 box to view it.

We'll see them coming

[News for nerds]

O'Reilly - Amazon.com Web Services Nutshell
O'Reilly - Essential BARWN
O'Reilly - Hardware Hackers Pocket Reference
O'Reilly - Online Gaming The Definitive Guide

This guy is wrong.

[Krapangor]

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.

bah

[asv108]

The term killer app is so overused. The title for this article should really be:

"Tim Oreilly tries to promote next conference.."

hardware hacking

[foog]

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...)

HyperCard-OS

[RobotWisdom]

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.

I say

[djupedal]

...the next true killer app is one I've been waiting for, for some time now.

Micro-payments!

Re:So where's the 'Killer App'?

[Rick the Red]

There's a problem with predicting the future -- it's almost impossible. We won't know the next "killer app" until it bites us on the butt.

My buddies and I used to try and guess the next "killer car" -- the Corvair was our benchmark. It was cheap and available and then suddenly it was rare, expensive, and desireable. The question was what car to buy today that would be worth more tomorrow. So far we're batting zero on that one. The Datsun 240Z and Mazda RX-7 looked promising, but they made so damn many of them that they never became rare. In hindsite I'd have to say we'll never see another Corvair. We were trying to use history to predict the future, but the future is always somehow different in some key way. I think Mr. O'Reilly is making the same mistake.

Emergency Telecommuting

[Arch_dude]

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.

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.