THE KONGQUEST

I just watched the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O and was completely blown away by future potential of this application. Google has rethought the way communication should be done and put it all into one neat little package.

The premise of a “wave” begins with a message that is the start of a dialog between one person and another or a group of people. From there it can transform into a number of things simultaneously. It can become a static back and forth conversation like email, a real time back and forth conversation like instant messaging, or a work in progress like a word document or presentation that can be presented as a whole thought in it’s final state.

The impact of having these options to transform mediums immediately and fluidly will decrease the chances of online miscommunication dramatically. Because you can have a conversation and pop in a comment in any position you want to call attention to or re-write any part of the message and be accountable for it in the conversation playback, accountability for correct informatin lies on all participants.

What I like most of this application as the “email and instant messager killer” is that the Wave can be taken as far as you want it to. Open a wave with a friend and just treat it like you do as email. That’s fine. Open a wave with someone who is currently online and talk in real time. That’s fine too. Take it to the next step in the conversation and brainstorm a trip idea and put some pictures into the email and you can transform that whole conversation into a travel itinerary or travel guide for a book, ready to be exported immediately with some of Googles tools in the Wave.

This is THE application that all the collaboration and web 3.0 and tech geeks have been talking about when they say the future of the internet is content streamed through different portals (RSS makes it so that we do not see the original websites built around blog content) and that information will be collaborated in real time instead of statically in silos all over the web. I am interested in seeing how the world takes on this new technology and runs with it. I hope it’ll reach mass appeal like the advent of email, instant messaging, blogging, and now tweeting and just replace all those older communication channels.

TED recently had a post on an interview with P.W. Singer on the future of war and the use of robotics. It’s very interesting to think about science fiction and the ripple effects of the current progress of technology. We as modern human beings are still not ready to accept the use of intelligent robotics or know that they’re in everything we’re using. Check out the article for more information.

Article: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Battlestar Galactica: An exclusive interview with P.W. Singer on the future of war

I want a powerful web tablet already! I came across The Net Impact of Netbooks? article from Knowledge@Wharton and became very curious about this recent market for the middle ground between a laptop and smartphone. Which led me to do a little research online about what other people are thinking and doing about netbooks. This is how I found TechCrunch’s dream project for the perfect netbook. A “Web Tablet” is what they call it and they’re doing it on their own. It’s one thing to wish and tell the world what you want and another to be actually developing it on your own from scratch.

If you don’t know already and want a little run down, a netbook or web tablet works much like a laptop would but is stripped down to the bare essentials to do the most computing experience through the internet. This is important and is a huge game changer because people are starting to trust storing their data online. You can now do all your office work online without having to use any space on your hard drive through services like google documents, Zoho, or any similar host of services online. In addition, all entertainment needs are starting to be provided outside your physical computer. You probably already watch a majority of your videos through services like youtube or vimeo and can listen to music on demand through services like imeem or last.fm. In addition, services like netflix can stream movies online and more and more TV stations are allowing full episodes of their shows to be streamed through the network websites such as ABC. Sooner or later, the original idea of the PC will be distant memory and we will have super fast, light weight, touch screen, wirelessly connected computers in our homes and offices in place of laptops and PCs.

The use of all data storage and cables that is not directly linked to the internet will be obsolete for the average consumer. This would include satellite TV, cable TV, large hard drives, CDs, DVDs, tapes, casettes, and 8-tracks. I will guess that most major data will be based online. Personal data that we’d like to carry around will ultra small like mini-SD cards. I see a market for encryption and privacy on accessing this type of hardware.

I am interested to see how fast our technology will develop to where all we have are wirelessly connected windows into the online world. We’d come home from working on our touch screen tablets where ever we wanted to work and watch TV on a super flat widescreen with over a million streaming feeds on whatever suits our desires. We would talk on our touch screen phones that have video feeds of who we’re talking to and we can go online and get feeds of information on whatever we wanted to know and get mini-entertainment on the go.

Since the beginning of email, people have been pissing each other off by sending chain letters to a massive list of contacts. In response, you will always have some jokester or heckler replying back to everyone on the list, basking in the limelight of mass communication. From PopMatters magazine comes a great article on this odd cultural phenomenon. Check it for some great writing and humorous reflection of our electronic culture. Here’s an excerpt:

REPLY ALL is an attention-seeker’s dream: within seconds, we find that our reach and impact has spread like the first sneeze in a second-grade classroom. Providing the recipients bother to open the email – and read it—our voice is being heard not only by friends and coworkers, but by utter strangers around the world. With a simple click from someone who’s bored at their day job in the cube, looking to kill some time, the spot – er, computer-light—is cast upon us.

It is our moment, so we had better make it count; we may as well use all capital letters, you know, THE SHOUT – let’s not forget multiple exclamation points, too. And hey, may as well tell our best jokes, perhaps show off our erudition and cultural savvy with a few well-chosen references to the latest books, movies, or a phrase gleaned from news coverage of international politics.

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