Three technological areas to think about

5/14/2006

As early adulthood dawns on me, I find myself wondering what the future will be like. Will the internet, at least in its current iteration, exist 20 years from now? Will social networks and people aggregators like MySpace make it for another decade? Technologically, I am curious to see how we advance across three particular areas: information overload, content authentication, and establishing a digital identity.

Information overload. It is 2006, and I feel drained after checking my blog aggregator, email, newsgroups, and away messages. Personally, these communication gateways are clogging my mind and hindering productivity. I think we are addicted to awareness. Why do we care about the minute data shards? Are these alert and notification systems bad for us? This might be socially backwards thing to do, but I am going to start decreasing my internet consumption.

Content authentication. Validity is determined by fact rather than opinion. The best example of this is the controversy regarding Wikipedia. Even though I see it as a great tool, I understand that it will never replace traditional encyclopedias (compiled by people who have an incentive to guarantee data integrity). When I was growing up, teachers and professors discouraged the invocation of internet sites as sources. I do not think this opinion will ever completely disappear. Simply: unless data comes from a trusted source, it is not to be trusted. Yes, I used trusted two times in that sentence.

Identity establishment. I own a cell phone, laptop computer, desktop computer, and music player. It is an incredible bummer that I have to manage four versions of my identity, even though they are all the same. I think we are no longer than a few years from having intelligent device discovery and "meta" authentication protocols (enough to abstract these devices) based on trust. Unless a critical bio-mass is attained, every identity provider must be platform agnostic.

Flash scares me

5/07/2006

I know I am going to get in trouble for this, but I have to admit it: Macromedia (now conjoined with Adobe) needs to seriously revamp the Flash user interface. As it stands in it's 8th iteration, the UI is awful for beginner/casual motion developers (like me) to use. I attribute my bad experience to Macromedia's assumption that I am knowledgeable about their product's specific workflow. If they continue to make ambiguous interfaces, I would at least expect more verbose documentation. I am not slamming Flash as a protocol, as there are oodles of awesome Flash sites out there that make my jaw drop. My mom can open up Photoshop and figure things out rather progressively through comfortable trial and error. On the other hand, she would most definitely be scared away by all the windows, buttons, timelines, keyframes, and other jargon plaguing the Flash interface. This is a huge content creation barrier that needs to be solved.

Superman Returns trailer

5/02/2006

The second Superman Returns trailer has arrived. I am going to definitely watch this movie five times in two days. Enough said.