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The Next Big Thing — Why Web 2.0 Isn't Enough
An anonymous reader writes "TechConsumer has an interesting discussion about what it will take for the next big thing, and why Web 2.0 is only just the beginning. 'Realtors have been giving us the answer for years, although they didn't know it. The next big thing is..."location, location, location". Think of how we access all the information of the Internet. We do it at a desk, where wires keep us attached to a specific location. Laptops help us branch out a bit, but even then we are tied to a wireless connection. Go to far and you no longer have access to information.'"
..and when some crazy has me buried in a 18 century dungeon, my PDA, from 2019, tells me 439 meters due north is a antique mill!
Web 2.1! Web 2.0 is going to be really buggy!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Where is this place "far" that you speak of and why can't we access information there? I feel bad for anyone from "far". Oh! You meant too far!
I understand but come on it changes the meaning and more importantly makes it difficult to read. Quick proof read next time please.
>>Today we have access to an unfathomable amount of information. Web 2.0 has helped us begin to organize and make sense of that information.
I guess I don't really get Web 2.0 then.
Not sure I get the "location, location, location" thing either. Yahoo has had local Yahoos for years now. How would tags work better than regular Google searches?
It has been exciting to see where things are headed with location based applications - for instance, google will be releasing AdSense in the Google Maps API, which will have some very seriously monetization implications for not only our apps, but anyone developing with their API
Shameless plug, but check out our site www.mapgroove.com
Bruce Sterling wrote a similar, but even more imaginative article in Wired, about a concept which he called the hyperlocal web. The dept 'long-way-to-go' on this article is interesting in light of Sterling's piece, because in a sidebar, he basically makes the point that Google is already building all the information necessary for this sort of stuff with Google Earth. Combine that with Google's recent interest in the wireless spectrum and GPS and bam! it sorta hits you: Google's already working on this stuff. How far off are they? I guess only time will tell.
My blog
"If I'm driving down a dirt road, I can access the Internet, enter in the key words, "eat, roast beef sandwich'. The next time I pass within 5 miles of an Arby's my device let's me know."
So will it be giving you directions or providing a warning?
Yea this will be the next big thing. The problem is that you will get directions to Arby's but you will not get directions to Bill's deli. You know that little hole in the wall where they bake their own rolls and use real roast beef?
Yea the next big thing in advertising.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Until I get telecommuting, I don't really care for this new technology. The problem isn't "location, location, location". It's that I have to be places where I don't want to be.
This month's wired features several articles about Hyperlocality and geospatial interfacing between the web and the world:
_ maps
c al
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/lo
Bill
This is a whole new paradigm! Web 2.1 is so Web 1.0, nobody does QA nowadays.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What the author is saying is take your PDA with GPS, walk around and have it automatically search for hits at your coordinates, with links to relevant info.
What this depends on is information being indexed by coordinates, via tags or elsewise. Not sure that'll take off.
Instead, why don't points of interest broadcast on an open (but secure, if possible) network? Go to a museum, a list of links pops up on your PDA.
Either that or index the whole world in google earth|maps or something similar.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I guess I don't really get Web 2.0 then.
That's because it's a buzzword, implying much and meaning little. It's all about Dynamic HTML! No! It's all about centralized data! No! It's all about distributed services!
It's all just a little bit of what the web's been since 1998, only we're getting better at it, so people have to make it into something to puff out their vita, and make them "marketable," even though they were part of the reason we had the other buzzword, the "dot-com bubble."
IT marketers do love their buzzwords.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
to be writing articles. This is the nice way. --paul
Your brain is not a computer.
Actually, I think the GP's point wasn't that Arby's was trying to lock out Bill's Deli, but rather that Bill (of Bill's Deli) doesn't understand why he should need a web presence, etc. I've often done web searches to try to find the hours of operation on some of my favorite eating places only to find that they don't have a web presence. I can usually find an article on them by the local paper, but those don't always have the hours of operation (or a menu).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Think about a Zoo and walking around a virtual zoo, while walking in the zoo and clicking on a virtual sticker that read about an animal. Or a guide for tourist, that gave info on every inch of a city.
Was an amazing job and I enjoyed it. That is where it's going I believe.
location, location, location
/. is usually "basement, basement, basement". Is he talking about people who have a real life or something? Now, if a gizmo could help me locate the pizza I dropped yesterday...
Which for us on
Table-ized A.I.
To bad you don't know how two proof-read.
I think the author of this piece overestimates how much time people spend touring. Sure, this could be handy in the few situations you're in a new place hunting for something new, but people don't spend a lot of time doing that. On the other hand, looking at the other two revolutions listed by the author, people need to find things on the internet all the time, and socializing is a daily thing. You could build a neat digital location tagging game, à la electronic geocaching, but I doubt it'd be long before it was polluted with idiots and spam. And how long can people play hide-and-seek? Sure, there are certainly niche applications, but I doubt it'll be the Next Big Thing.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Flickr: 18 errors
Reddit: 28 errors
MySpace: 210 errors (no surprise there)
Seems like he's in good company, after all.
(I also checked Digg, they had zero errors, so someone in that space is doing something right.)
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
A Google search was less than helpful. Can you provide more information about CityPoint? I have not seen any TeleAtlas cars in my city (Charlottesville, Virginia), and I suspect there might not be any near Bill's Deli, either. :)
There's good hope that the solution you suggest will work great for Charlottesville (college town full of tech-savvy people), but I don't know how well it will work for Bill's Deli in more rural areas. Eventually, perhaps, but I don't see it happening soon.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The government has a specific interest in not putting companies out of business.
If a "open" network that allows VOIP existed, would any cellular carrier still exist? OK, assuming Verizon still has out-of-major-city towers, would any carrier that is mostly big-cities-only (Tmobile) still exist?
Sure, the government doesn't guarantee that a business will exist forever, but if the government starts making a habit out of squashing businesses how long will it be before nobody decides to take the risk on a startup because the government might?
Sort of like competing with Microsoft - they release a new free add-on to Windows that replaces whatever it is you decided to publish. Nobody does that anymore just because Microsoft "might". It happened maybe 8 times total, so it isn't as if Microsoft did it to 100 different players.
So no wonder AT&T would fight it. It is their entire operation at stake. And it is a very difficult question to answer if the government should ever do something like that. Something I am sure the courts are going to have lots of fun with.
FTA: Think of the last time you were at a national park. It's a very good possibility that the only information you had about the park fit on a tri-fold paper that you picked up at the visitor's station. In the information age, how is this acceptable?
It's more than just acceptable. It's exactly what I want when I go to a national park: to get away from the hyper-connected world of technology. The only information I want I will get from the park ranger, who hopefully can't tell his DVD-ROM from his Firewire, but can answer my questions about lizards and rocks.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Your post is late, under-delivered, and does nothing but copy those who've come before you.
Yep, you're certainly qualified to write about Vista!
"People who liked this book dated this person!"
"People who dated this person also dated this person."
I'm only sort of joking...
I know it's inevitable, but I don't particularly like or need the constant link to information that Internet-everywhere would provide. I don't need to feel connected everywhere I go. I'm perfectly happy to go into my office and use the computer to type an e-mail, or sit on my couch and read news headlines and check local weather on my Nintendo Wii.
:D
I think the urge to move everything to a constant, Internet-everywhere connection is driven by some kind of mental illness. I really don't want to have people constantly e-mailing me, phoning me, text messaging me, sending me stupid links, pictures and trying to get me to join Facebook. If they really want to talk to me, they can come over to my house, or meet me for a coffee, or invite me over. Or even use the telephone.
I also think that most of the information we want so bad to have at our fingertips within seconds of it happening is useless garbage anyway. I don't need my life and my mind crowded with terabytes of crap.
That's why I only browse Slashdot every couple days
From my home, I have only 56kdialup available. From the South Pole, I have more.
You're in a land populated by penguins and surprised they have good Internet connections? Where do you think Linux comes from?
Ok, so maybe "touring" is not what I am thinking about, but lots and lots of people go to unfamiliar cities all the time. Business travel is loaded with people like this.
I would use it and I go to places I am already familiar with. I would use it even more if I had never been to that city. Hell, I use it in my own city for that matter.
Imagine, you are looking at your smartphone (whatever flavor)...."Let's see...where is my hotel in relation to the city? Now show me steakhouses within walking distance. Cool, just found a dinner place for tomorrow night. Actually, show me Italian also in case I am not in the mood for steak. Let's see - how about something to do tomorrow night. Is there a theater nearby? What movies are on? How about a ballpark or stadium nearby. Anybody playing?"....and on...and on.
Don't underestimate the need to fill boredom and lack of familiarity in business travelers. This will be HUGE, with spam or without.
The iPhone is lip service. A couple of days ago, that realization hit me.
u al-cell-network-connectivity + Google's no-longer-dark-fiber-network-with-WiFi-access-poin ts-everywhere = no more need for a cell phone.
1) The iPhone is released as a "regular" cell phone. It has a crappy service provider, a sketchy network, and all the lockdowns necessary to satisfy said SP+Network. AT&T takes the bait.
2) Speculation grew over a few days over how much in common parts/software the iPhone shares with iPod. iPod is an established product and brand with no ties to anyone else's product, service, or network. iPhone is "AT&T-locked crap" and even the "iPhone" trademark was disputed with at least 3 other companies. It's not long for the world because...
3) The next iPod is supposedly an iPhone device without the cellular capabilities. This sounds limited, but it's not. It'll still be a phone. Regardless of whether Apple includes an actual "handset" shape to the device, there have been microphone+speaker add-ons for the iPod for years. There's also an iPod SDK. This means...
4) Someone will develop a SIP client for iPod. Hell, Apple will probably make one themselves. It will use the iPod's soon-to-be-added WiFi feature. You will have a "cell phone" anywhere with a hot spot. That leaves you SOL if you're away from WiFi hotspots, though. Unless...
5) Google bought assloads of dark fiber and is talking up the prospect of a nationwide WiFi network.
Apple iPod-with-all-of-iPhone's-capabilities-except-act
AT&T just stepped on a land mine and no longer has any legs. It was a land mine shaped like a stylized apple with a bite out of it.
I was with you up to that point. A nationwide 802.11x mesh is neither economically nor technically feasible. 802.11x is good for what it's currently used for, and not much more. In reality, something higher power and longer range is necessary -- like existing cell networks, and/or WiMAX.
It took hundreds of APs for google to cover the town of Mountain View, CA (population: 70,000). Oh, and you're capped at 1 megbit/sec up/down
Google's proposal to cover SF in a similar fasion is slated to provide only 300 k/sec speeds to free users, and 1 megabit/sec to those paying $22/month; At those prices, DSL is almost certainly a better option. Given the numbers on the page, google expects to use as many as 1500 APs to cover San Francisco, an incredibly compact city with an area of only 47 square miles (which it's probably safe to assume this project would only cover some of)
Even generously assuming that 1,500 802.11g APs can cover all of San Francisco's 47 square miles, that's still 32 APs per square mile. At that rate, covering the city of Los Angeles would take roughly 20,000 APs, and covering Los Angeles County would take 150,000. And while you may deem that somewhat practical, applying the same treatment to the rural US (which, coincidentally, makes up *most* of the country, by area) is far less practical -- covering the state of Wyoming would require 6 APs for every resident!
Covering the country's densest cities in 802.11g APs is just barely practical. Covering the entire nation is laughable.