Old post from 2009... On Another Podcast, Ben Evans tells a story about the editor of one of the biggest UK fashion magaines saying "I don't need to know how a printing press works, so I don't need to know how the internet works". I was thinking about the technology behind things like web3, cryptocurrencies etc., and how perhaps much of it is analagous to the technology of the internet; most people haven't a clue about things like public/private key encryption, TCP/IP, packet-switching networks etc. - and yet they use them every day. So understanding how blockchains work might not be quite as important as some people seem to think today. Which reminded me of this post I wrote in 2009. I think there's a direct analogy between how I was thinking about the mobile internet in the early 1990s (when smartphones had reasonably decent web browsers, but websites were stuck in a world of sacrificing accessibility for the sake of the flashy functionality of splash pages and plugins) and todays views of the metaverse.

As a rule, the world of computer nerds, science fiction nerds and Internet nerds look at the future with a kind of excited optimism, as a utopian vision of a time when todays problems will have fallen away, solved by the emerging technologies that are just starting to appear from the R&D departments of technology giants and bright young startups.

Yet this bright future never really makes it past the horizon. The future isn't bright, as Orange used to claim. The future is boring and pointless.

Why?

Well, Mashable recently published an article on "7 Technologies shaping the future of social media", which illustrates my point. Social media, combining the rise in user generated content, social networking and consumer control, is definitely on the rise with more time being spent on "UGC" sites— checking Facebook, reading blogs and commenting on news stories. What's more, with the rise of the mobile web, it's about to get even more interesting as the many-to-many communication platform of the Internet reaches beyond the desktops and laptops and into peoples pockets. People can connect to one another anywhere, and at any time.

The most interesting thing about Mashable's list though is how very uninteresting the things listed are to most people;

The Arduino
RFID tags and Transponders
Geomagnetic sensors
Optical pattern recognition & Augmented reality
OpenID, OAuth and the Identity Graph
Mind Reading
Natural Language Processing

OK, so "mind reading" stands out as the odd one out, as it sounds pretty cool. But it also sounds pretty scary- I'm pretty sure that people won't want to have their minds read— at least not on a day to day basis— so I'm going to discount it as a part of this vision of the future. (Because if a nerd like me won't actually want it tomorrow, why would anyone else want it the day after?)

But the rest are all very definitely in the category of "things I'm not going to talk to my friends about in the pub." (Well, most of my friends...) Which is precisely why they are going to be an interesting part of the future.

That probably sounds like twisted logic, so let me first give an example of the opposite case;

Exciting and useful: The Mobile Internet

Fifteen years ago, when we were starting to use our telephones to dial up to the Internet and at about the same time starting to use mobile phones to make telephone calls from anywhere we wanted, the promise of the "Mobile Internet" has been around.

It's interesting, and exciting, and useful. Being able to access websites wherever you are has potential. Maps, shops, communities and services, all at your fingertips, wherever you are, whenever you want them. Great stuff.

Except fast forward fifteen years, and it still isn't really here. The fact that it was interesting and exciting meant that there was clearly money to be made, and everyone wants to be the ones making all the money.

First, the mobile networks wanted to "own" it, so they started by locking it down— we had "mobile internet" that wasn't really "the Internet", but just a network operated portal that didn't go anywhere; a walled off, stripped down corner of the web, locked up by the guys who gave you your "free" handset.

Great for the value (or more relevant for their stock prices, the future value) of the networks; not so great for the value of the mobile internet.

In the networks' defence, neither handsets or web pages were optimized for one another, so links to "normal" web pages could be slow, expensive and useless— it probably was the best thing to do at the time for the sake of user experience. But in keeping the users away from them, there was no need for websites to optimise for mobile, or for users to look for better handsets.

Then the phone manufacturers wanted to own it, selling expensive devices that could use email and web browsers, while selling cheap ones that didn't to everyone else. Great for boosting the value of expensive handsets— the smartphones and PDAs; not so great for the value of the mobile internet.

Then the iPhone came along and solved the problem by creating a new one; with a web browser as good as a desktop browser, the web was truly opened up to mobile. But it also introduced the App Store; a closed off, device-specific walled garden. Why spend time and money developing a mobile website when you could build an iPhone application and sell it, generating actual revenue?

Now, we are still hung up by the most pointless of marketing phrases; "The Year of Mobile", this magical point when all these dreams will become a reality and suddenly, in the space of a convenient 12 months, everyone would be using their phones to go online.

Well, it's not going to happen. We didn't have a "Year of The Internet", or a "Year of TV", a "Year of Radio", or even a "Year of Print." So why would we expect to have a "Year of Mobile"?

Or to put it another way, it already happened last year when it became cheap, usable and easy- but only for those who thought a £100 phone on an expensive 18 month contract was worth buying when there are hundreds available for free (and a better version would be along before the contract term was up.) Meanwhile, those waiting for "the year of mobile" were watching the 90% of the population without one and waiting for some magical metric of penetration to tell them that it was now something that more people do than don't.

The great handsets are still at the high end of the market, tied to exclusive network contracts, and firmly out of the reach of people who don't want to commit to an 18 month contract or shell out a three figure sum for a fancy phone.

So we're still waiting for the really useful stuff that will come when the technology available hits a significant market share— like the ability to take it for granted that a simple form on a major website will be worth taking the time to complete because you can feel confident that it will work on your mobile phone properly, because the benefits of having it outweigh the costs of the work needed to rebuild it. (Not to mention to replace all those cool Flash bits and pieces with web standards and HTML equivalents— again, boring old web standards that will be the foundation for a useful future platform get held back by cool-but-inaccessible Flash animations, keeping thousands of websites firmly tied to the desktop.)

Being exciting and useful has hampered the development of Mobile Internet at every possible point. It's the future, sure— but a future that is, by my reckoning, at least 5 years overdue already.

But back to the interesting stuff; the pointless and boring things of the future.

Arduino is a circuitboard. Remember the people you knew at school who were into building and playing with circuitboards? Probably not the most dynamic social movers in the class. But this cheap circuitboard is allowing those people to flex their imaginations and build the kind of exciting and useful applications that made the last generation of nerds into some of the richest people on the planet today. Arduino means, to those of us who aren't handy with a soldering iron, that what people are knocking up in their sheds are a step closer to the "wouldn't it be cool if..." gadgets of their imaginations, of science fiction and comic books. The question isn't "can I manufacture it?" (Which quickly turns into a question of "could I sell it?"), but "can I build it?" (Or perhaps, "how much do I want it?")

Think of everything in your house that has some sort of control- the oven, the kettle, the TV, the thermostat, the lights. Now imagine having access to all those controls wherever you are.

How much energy could you save if you could turn your central heating on and off over the Internet, with your mobile phone. Every time you are out for an evening in the winter. Every time you go away for a weekend. Every time you are a little bit warmer than you really need to be, but too lazy to get off the sofa or out of bed.

Now consider what could happen if they could talk to one another? If your bedside clock could switch on the kettle and the light when it's alarm went off? If your ovens alarm could send an alert to your mobile phone to tell you when dinner is ready, or simply when it's finished preheating? If your fridge could tell the milkman whether you need an extra pint to be delivered the next day?

RFID and transponders- again, we are talking about the kind of electronics that probably made your eyes glaze over in Physics lessons. But these are the kind of things that make oyster cards work. Say you could swipe in at a bar, concert or nightclub to automatically update your Facebook status (or a specific application) to say that's where you are, and alert a set of friends that you have arrived, or register to have an MP3 of the nights musical playlist to be sent to you the next morning.

Optical recognition could be another way of doing the same thing; the principles of a barcode, combined with the camera on a mobile phone as a "scanner" make it easy to enter data, so instead of typing in a web address or SMS code, just point your phone at a picture and have it do the data entry for you. Taking the idea a step further, it could be used to recognise faces or pictures— something already demonstrated by the SnapTell iPhone application, which recognises books, CD and DVD covers and looks them up on sites like Amazon and Wikipedia. (Something that I'm pretty sure the HMVs and Waterstones of the world must be getting more than a little worried about…)

OpenID and OpenAuth makes Facebook and other online identities easier to manage; the idea of one identity and one password that lets you log in to any website without having to share your security details with them, allowing more and more online networks to interact. See if your Facebook friends have been active on Flickr or YouTube, for example, or if your Twitter friends have left comments on the BBC news story you are reading, or reviewed the music you are listening to on Last.fm.

"Geomagnetic sensors"— or more likely, a compass to you and me— are the kind of things that are of virtually no 'value'; the kind of thing you might get in a cheap Christmas cracker. It isn't going to increase the market value of a handset— how many people got excited about the feature when it was introduced in the iPhone 3GS? But once it's tied into your phone, combined with a colour screen and an Internet connection, it suddenly makes location-based services a whole lot easier to use.

Which makes Augmented Reality a step closer to… well, reality. Combined with optical recognition (the ability for a camera to not just capture but actually recognise and understand what it sees), Augmented Reality is about layering information from the virtual world on top of the real world. So, point a phone camera (with a geomagnetic sensor and GPS) at a landscape, and have it annotate the landscape for you. Here are a few examples that show what this technology can do now, and could be doing soon.

Technology is the future, and it's dull. But the potential applications of those technologies, what people can build at little cost- provided they are equipped with the tools to do it and not restricted by patents, licensing fees and other roadblocks put in front of them by businesses trying to maintain exclusivity— that's really exciting stuff.

Yet this bright future never really makes it past the horizon. The future isn't bright, as Orange used to claim. The future is boring and pointless.

Some Random Nerd

Exciting and useful: The Mobile Internet