

What futures are already here? - neilk

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet." -- William Gibson<p>I find this quote to be a more reliable guide to the future than most predictions.<p>In 2000, Google was already two years old. Wireless was still pretty new, but every geek gathering just <i>had</i> to have it. Little digital cameras that you could attach to a phone were interesting curiosities. Phones that did email and web browsing existed but were super expensive and clunky.<p>In the other thread with predictions for the decade, almost all of them boil down to whatever's hot in 2009, only more so.<p>I'd like to ask the HN community to instead think of the really niche, expensive, geeky, "the mainstream will never get this" aspects of their lives <i>right now</i>. Stuff they find really useful, or just cool. And then consider if there's any upper bound to much they could scale up, or how easy these technologies could be made for others.<p>Now <i>those</i> would be predictions....
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neilk
I'll kick it off:

1\. Self-hosted social networking. Lots of my geekier friends are getting
frustrated with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook or Flickr, for a variety of
reasons. They are retreating to personal sites to host their photos and blogs,
and they just interact with the rest of the world with RSS.

There are some missing pieces here, but people have been talking about
distributed social networking for quite a while. We may be reaching critical
mass.

2\. Ubiquitous streaming video: right now, top bloggers like Scoble carry
video cameras around at all times, and for special geek events, the grainy
live video feed is standard. By 2019, that could easily be in everybody's
phone (assuming the bandwidth is there, if not, then only in countries with
decent telephony).

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skmurphy
I like James Brian Quinn's definition innovation: the reduction to practice of
an invention in a culture. The focus of the question was on the expensive and
geeky but the larger impacts may come from the re-purposing of 'simple'
technologies for basic human needs.

Gerald Weinberg is dying of a rare form of cancer, thymic carcinoma. He used
twitter to announce he was still alive
<http://twitter.com/JerryWeinberg/status/7271106797> and he is using a special
blog <http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/geraldmweinberg/mystory> to allow his
family, friends, and many readers to follow his condition, leave tributes, and
make donations.

There are things that the "mainstream may get" before the HN community that
are worth paying attention to as well. They may not be a source of "change
your life" wealth, but they may change the quality of your life.

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qw
RSS. It has been available for years, but has not reached mainstream yet.

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mooism2
Do home servers count? Certainly not mainstream yet in the UK.

