How do you think the internet will be in 5 to 10 years?

myoung8 · on July 17, 2007

I've heard some people propose that it will be 3-dimensional. Apparently some government agencies have created their own Intranets in 3D claiming it makes it easier to find stuff (not sure if I believe this or not...). If it's true, though, then I wouldn't be surprised to see it on the consumer web in the near to medium-term future.

ivankirigin · on July 18, 2007

True 3D doesn't make sense for a lot of kinds of data. Images are inherently planar.

My limited hope is that the web can be as peppy as today's desktop interfaces. The elephant in the room of "Web 2.0" is how slow lots of implementations of asynchronous server communication are.

edu · on July 17, 2007

Well, it seems that SL is getting a hughe hype right now. I'm a bit skeptical about 3D metaverses, but I'm not really a good oracle ;)

ryantmulligan · on July 17, 2007

Three-dimensional navigation, for many tasks, involves questionable ergonomics.

JohnN · on July 17, 2007

"bus stops that broadcast the wait time for the next bus"

We already have that in the UK, though admitedly its not too reliable!

edu · on July 17, 2007

Well, here in Barcelona we have something similar too. On some stops a display shows the expected time and on the rest you can send an SMS.

_hgt1 · on July 17, 2007

Yeah, I occasionally use it too. have you seen the new buses that announce which stop you're arriving at (like in the metro)?

edu · on July 17, 2007

yes! but the system is still being tested.

PindaxDotCom · on July 17, 2007

1. Increased bandwidth ... enough bandwidth to make it no longer a factor

2. Increased wi-fi coverage ... a free planet-wide wi-fi service?

3. Better mobile hardware ... a mobile device that is smaller than a laptop, larger than an iphone, and more useful than either.

ivankirigin · on July 18, 2007

"enough bandwidth to make it no longer a factor"

You need to do an order-of-magnitude idea check. Wireless video broadcast is extremely intensive, and radio technology is expanding at a sub-linear rate.

There is a problem with Moore's law vs. 2D images: making more transistors on an imager will only be half as effective as the extra cpu power needed to crunch it. A doubling of density turns a 320x240 into 640x480. This means twice the computation for four times the image size.

The point is that bandwidth will always matter. Video is the kind of application that will make it matter.

euccastro · on July 17, 2007

I think a 12" laptop is small enough. Smaller than that and you can't type comfortably.

myoung8 · on July 17, 2007

I think BlackBerry users would beg to differ. I've seen some people typing pretty darn fast on those things, and I wouldn't have thought it possible. It's all about habituation.

msiegel · on July 17, 2007

Less Gratuitous Flash, more Information Appliance.

fixito · on July 17, 2007

once we get high quality speech recognition for videos where transcripts can be made and searched and when bandwidth in the US stops being pathetic and catches up with the rest of the world, then text will take a backseat to video and typical pages will start looking more and more like joost.