The next big internet thing

I had a farewell chat with my friends with some dark beers and was curious what do they expect from the internet. It's a bit of a split question, including the next big thing and a personal wish. The outcome was sort of expectable yet interesting.


The first in line was augmentation. That's a mindblowing segments for me still today. I wrote my first augmented reality mashup 3 years ago, it was a simple pattern recognizer with a 3D translation backend. (Than I added it to Drupal.) Very simple if you have the right tool and funny how mesmerizing it can be. And now 3 years later it's still a thing. Google glass will definitely change the way we use technology in our everyday life. When I mentioned how far mobile devices are from being seamless I referred to this exactly. That's something that you can use all the time.

The other big wish that come up during the talk is data openness. The open governments all over the world, the public APIs and services. It's a bit surprising to me why would anyone care about government - but I have to admin the data to offer is massive. Infrastructure, transportation, security and health services, not to talk about administrations. In my theory that's an accelerator that makes things happen faster and more precisely. Funny however, augmentation has some joints with open data. When you access it instantly at the right place it's gonna be super effective.

My wish was kinda childish compare the those. I want to have an ultimate notification service. For me it's a big problem that I don't know when a comment I took somewhere has been responded. I leave notes at many places, mostly on Drupal.org, but several other sites as well. And it's really not convenient to visit all the sites and all the places where I expect an update. I need something like a browser extension I can use to save sites and more importantly pages where I'm active so later I can see where I should go back and check the status.

It's always interesting to see what's the general wish of people. I've read a great article about a father and his daughter. He noticed the difference between his and the child's preference and overall opinion about apps. It looks pretty normal, kids are different as usual. But it turns a light on. What if preventing kids using high tech tools prevents innovation? Imagine all the kids on world would have an internet capable device. Tablet or a phone preferably - as they tend to be smaller than adults. What would they want from technology when they are 6? Or 10? 14? We all have our needs because of our experience.

I guess there should be a baby-safe iPhone sometime soon.

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If you made it this far, please tell me in 5 words (or more) what's your wish from the internet.

Peter