NOTE: The title? I’ll let you figure it out for yourself, though I will suggest that if you don’t already own each and every Massive Attack and Tricky album, then you really should consider changing that just as fast as you possibly can.

For those that already know what I’m talking about, suffice it say…

‘nuf said ;)
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So Jason Kolb, both a good friend and professional colleague in whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for has been on a blog entry tear like none other over the past six months. If you haven’t already subscribed to his web feed, you really need to change that or get left behind by those who are, and as such, already know EXACTLY what I am talking about.

So, with that… Do yourself a favor and snap out of that Karmacoma funk you’ve been in and Future Proof yourself courtesy of Jason’s latest entry,

JasonKolb.com: The Next Big Thing on the Web

My Take On the Future

So what are my thoughts about the next big thing on the Web? Here’s what I think will happen over the next five years:

* AJAX technologies will continue to be refined and will become the de facto standard for rich Web interfaces.
* Push! That’s right, push technology will be making a comeback, but in a slightly different form. See my post about it for more details.
* The back-ends of Web applications will become much more interesting and connected. New architectures and programming models will emerge that will treat the Web as a giant combination database and object library. This will result in much more flexible and powerful Web applications than you know and love today.
* XMPP will become much more prominent than it is today as its uses extend far beyond instant messaging.
* The Internet will become the fabric of our lives. You think the Internet is prevalent now, just wait until Wi-Max really takes off and free high-speed Internet is available pretty much everywhere. Couple that with the downward trending cost of hardware ($100 laptops) and the ability of just about every phone to surf the Web, and you ain’t seen nothing yet.
* Mobile Web applications and mobile payments will become commonplace.
* The semantic Web will take off, but not in the way that most semantic Web purists hope. It won’t be based on RDF or FOAF, it’ll be based on standardized API’s and schemas.
* Search engines will become less relevant (I blogged about this a while back) and niche-targeted sites like Technorati and blog networks will become more relevant.
* Politics, politics, politics. The Internet is going mainstream in a big way, and it’s going to change the face of politics in our country. Eventually, conventional TV advertising is going to be irrelevant compared to the Internet. Talk about leveling the playing field, this is a golden opportunity for us to take back our country. The Web is going to change the rules in politics. I’ve even started a separate blog to cover this topic: www.politicaltechblog.com.
* Online identity will be a critical issue. This will need to be solved in a decisive manner so that other key technologies can be sorted out including:
o Personal payment and finance. You’ll eventually use your online identity to pay for most things.
o Identity verification. Eventually our online identity will be the definitive source of authentication and reputation, not our social security number which is out of our control and not meant to serve as that anyway. Criminal records, credit reports, job history, and just about everything else will eventually tie back to our online identity. Think of it as normalizing all the databases out there with you in them in one place, owned by you.
o Voting. If you don’t think voting will be done online at some point you’re not thinking far enough ahead. The current efforts at building secure voting machines are incredibly ill-conceived and downright scary when you consider that the discussions around them are taking place behind closed doors. This process needs to be brought out in the open before the American people and we need to come up with a solution that everyone is comfortable with before our political system collapses.
* Finally, I think social networks will become a critical piece of our online experience and everyday workflow, but not in the form they exist today. I’ve been running a whole series of posts on this recently which you can check out for more details.

Maybe its just me, but it seems that what we have here is an Unfinished Symphony in the making. If I were an Angel (investor), to keep myself Safe From Harm, I would read, re-read, and then re-re-read his entire post from start to finish.

And then start the process all over again… You know, for your own Protection. Or you could remain like a Butterfly Caught in the cocoon of your very own self imposed Teardrop. In the end, it really is up to you there Risingson.

[Again, for those that already know… ‘nuf said. For those that don’t (please see above)]

Thanks Jason!
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Quick-Update: To be fair, I should at very least provide at least SOME background as to what I am refering to in all of this.

Take for example the following (ref: Mezzanine, the album in which many of the referenced tracks were a part of),

Hailed by many critics as an artistic success, the overwhelming mood of the album is one of murky oppression; the only respites are the pretty second single “Teardrop” and the chilled-out instrumental “Exchange”. …

…
The entire album was provided on Massive Attack’s website for legal download many months before it was released on CD. Many successful artists have since done the same, notably Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and The Smashing Pumpkins’s Machina II. It was also one of the first major uses of the MP3 compression system by a commercial organisation.

If you take nothing else away from this post, the very fact that an album as commercially and critically successful as Mezzanine was first released for legal download on Massive Attack’s website *BEFORE* the album itself even hit the stores, should speak VOLUMES in regards to why I believe Jason’s statement,

Finally, I think social networks will become a critical piece of our online experience and everyday workflow, but not in the form they exist today. I’ve been running a whole series of posts on this recently which you can check out for more details.

has even greater meaning than that in which it might initially be taken to mean.

In addition, what follows is the abstract for ““Inertia Creeps”, or a phenomenological perspective on objects in sociology” [NOTE: ‘Inertia Creeps’ is also a song on the Mezzanine album)

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Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology
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In this paper, the attitude of general sociology towards nature and objects is criticized. Usually, the social is so defined that it excludes objects, “things” in general. But this limiting definition of the social has led to a proliferation of the concept of “society”, which excludes first of all certain people - those not a part of a conscience collective - and second, it excludes objects from the social and thus from the realm of study of the social sciences. Yet objects, it is maintained here, have a very constitutive impact on social life. In order to clarify this, the paper aims to show two things: that there is a vocabulary with the help of which humans and non-humans can be sociologically described in a similar way; that objects cannot be sociologically explained away in the way a “radical” social constructivism would do.

Okay, so maybe the above is a bit over the top, but it does present an interesting perspective none-the-less. And if you know Jason, you know he’s an OOP kind of guy, and while I have made it no secret in regards to my own generalized feelings towards OOP, its not because I think objects in general are a bad thing, and instead they simply do not represent enough to provide all of the necessary elements to build an entire software ecosystem. There’s more to development life than objects, something that I believe SmallTalk represents quite well — That of the communication between objects, something I believe Jason has captured quite well in his comments regarding Jabber/XMPP.

None-the-less, objects are a fundamental component of the same mentioned software ecosystem. You can’t really send messages out onto the wire without any understanding of their final destination, and a way of interpreting these messages upon their arrival.

With that, there’s even more to it than just this, but if I let myself continue to jabber — Well, I think I can probably just leave it at that without ANY concern that anyone is left wondering “continue to jabber? what is it that he could be refering to? ” ;)

Enjoy your morning! :D