Developer's View: Real Life Inspirations Or Abstract Ideas?

StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.

Comments

It may be true, however...

[fyngyrz]

...that the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.

Re:It may be true, however...

[CastrTroy]

HTTPS was never as good as SHTTP

A real problem is that I have to send my credit card credentials to a website in order to buy something. The real fix would be for me to be able to buy something off a website without sending them my credentials. Instead, I'd only have to communicate to my credit card provider that I authorized the site to charge a certain amount to my credit card, and have the money transferred, without the site knowing the information on my card. The same could be done for recurring payments. Authorize the merchant to charge a certain amount against my card every month, without them actually having to know my credit card information. This is kind of like paypal, but without the middle man.