BigShinyThing

Last night I had a strange dream. The Two Fat Ladies (of cookery show ‘fame’) came to me, explaining that my computer had the first real Mac virus and that I’d signed up for every porn site on the web automatically. I now owed in excess of $10m on my credit card and I’d better come up with something quickly.

Ignoring what this says about my psyche (TV-obsessed, with a thing for matron figures, obviously unclean, feeling guilty about my erased bookmarks and in dire financial straits perhaps?) it did start me thinking. Web 1.0 was rubbish. Web 2.0 was better but still every little piece of my life online was pigeon-holed somewhere. I was promised my 15MB of fame and have been forced to settle for 26 comments on one of my flickr pics (a woman walking naked down a busy Brooklyn street). What will Web 3.0 really be like I wonder? Well here are some thoughts.

First of all I think that Social Networking will go beyond sending someone a virtual puppy on Facebook and start to morph into something useful. What’s the point of having 312 MySpace friends if you can’t borrow money from them?

I may be alone in this but I reckon that Social Networking will expand into community business with Friend Loans (yup, really ­ borrow money from those cyber friends, or put money into the pot for a decent rate of interest), group buying communities (you like Jabba figures too? Let¹s get together and negotiate a job lot) and Social Networking channels for people who like the same content and are happy broadcasting only to each other.

The End of Privacy

Everything I’ve done, said, thought and dreamed about in the last 2 years is somewhere out there online. I have no issue with that. Let’s face it; a lot of it was done not for immediate pleasure but in the knowledge that I’d get to post it later. I’ve said it often (as my web friends know) but I live my own life vicariously. The web has forced me to be interesting and if that means people being able to google my ass (literally) then so be it. At least in years to come I’ll be able to look back at a higher, firmer ass and say “those were the days”.

To this end I’m trying to get a bar concept off the ground. You round up all of the people indulging in a spot of on-cam cyber sex (via something like j-meeting) and you project them onto screens all around the bar. Turning something private into something public and helping end privacy once and for all. The great thing is they don’t know when/if they’re being broadcast.
Adds to the exhibitionist thrill for them and to voyeuristic thrill of my punters.

Marco Polo

There’s a lot to discover out there on the information superhighway. I predict, no I demand, that in the very near future people will pay ODiscoverers to go out and find specific content worth bookmarking for them. Actually they’ll probably just get the brands that they love to do it for them (I’d love to know what Gucci thinks is worth book marking).

Better brands

You know whether you’re a Match.com person or a Nerve.com person (are you looking for bridge and tunnel sex ­ not as dirty as it sounds) or for kinky sex with an underweight hipster on a urine stained mattress in a neighborhood that rings with Eastern European accents? The rest of the web is still a little unbranded. Right now 98% of everything sells something. But what nobody is taking into account is the fact that I want to buy my Burlesque books from someone I imagine wearing a corset rather than from the Amazon algorithm.

Babelfish 2.0

How about we move to one bloody platform. I have Mac, PC, Blackberry, CDMA phone, GSM phone and a Treo that I hate. Why don’t they all speak Intel? Somebody has to own portability. Somebody needs to offer me a techie babelfish.

Riding The Cloud

Let’s have lots of small, easily downloadable apps that surf the cloud of tags, images (and yes I want to be able to google search a picture too) and titles out there. I want to be able to Ovirtual tag the places that I love and search for things close by that I want to photograph. I want the world to be searchable and for my apps to all have access to that data.

So okay this has been a mad ramble. But it was a mad dream. Anyone that wants in on the bar, I’m serious about it.

Steve Walls is an inventor at What If New York.