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Flock, the New Browser on the Block
^tamago^ writes to tell us BusinessWeek Online is reporting that a new browser is stepping into the arena. This new competitor, Flock, hopes to change the face of web browsing by turning their's into the swiss army knife of browsers. From the article: "Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online"
Welcome to 2015.
You log onto the Internet. (Ha, ha! Scratch that.) You're on the Internet, as always. All cities are wired all the time, and there's hardly a device that doesn't speak with the net. Today's cell phones are as laughable as 9600 baud modems are today. New cell phones are capable of creating 3D models and textures from items- it's the most popular way of "uploading" physical artifacts into the 3D virtual world.
You have a moment, and are interested in seeing what your friends are up to. Vinnie's browsing the web, researching some papers on post-modern something-or-other. Minipi is reading a paper for his information architecture classes. Mattis in Germany is looking at some music band sites. You can see them transparently live, even though they are all over the planet.
You go up to the music band sites and see that not just Mattis is working on it, but others are as well. You strike up a conversation with Mattis about the music. (With your voice.) The other people nearby may listen in, they may not- they may instead opt to just read the speech-to-text'ed transcript which passively rolls by in the background.
Joel wants to know how I'm doing, he goes checks it out. He sees me talking with Mattis; He's not particularly interested in the conversation, so he won't butt in or knock on the door; Instead, he just slips me an instant message letting me know he's nearby. Mattis notices my pause, and sees that I've received a note. "Oh, sorry, Mattis, something really important just came up." I talk with Joel.
Joel is working on a paper, and I see where it is, mid-writing. He's working on it with another fellow, in real-time. He needs some expertise of mine for this particular part; Something important to me, and that he knew that, and wants my input on it. I read it over, make some edits. "Hmm," his friend says, and proposes some other changes. We talk about it. We notice that there are 5 shadow people, watching as we right. Some people are very interested in Joel's thoughts; They're having a conversation about what he's writing on the permiter.
The basic idea here is that we're going to enter the "World Live Web." It turns out that it's rather useful to see and be seen. There are tremendous things that are possible by networking people, and that means live interaction. Deferring communications all the time is interesting, but has some problems, especially in terms of mass organizing. One thing we will see are regularly scheduled "time windows." It'll be a temporal hangout. Like a meeting or appointment, but not necessarily as formal.
Now, if you want to play "invisible" and be a voyeur, then fine. If you don't want people to see you while you're writing, be my guest. You can be one of "the invisible people."
But a lot of us, we're going to participate in this new world.
It actually doesn't: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .microsoft.com%2Fwindows%2Fie%2Fdefault.mspx&chars et=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&verbose=1