The Past
Let me play Sherman for a second and let’s set the Way Back machine to 1991 when I started out making use of the Internet. Most individuals nowadays wouldn’t have recognized the Internet as it existed back then. About all that was around back then was e-mail, USENET, dinosaurs and gophers. You got it, you read that right, gophers. There were no world-wide-web websites, mainly because there was no World Wide Web. In those days, most of us utilized what were called BBS’s, bulletin board systems. Imagine them as cumbersome, clumsy, message boards as you understand them. We did not have a World Wide Web, we employed a little something often known as Gopherspace. Gopherspace was this real ugly place, nevertheless we thought it was terrific. It turned out to be all text with an infrequent hyperlink and it had been very difficult to get around in, but it was a lot better than little or nothing. FTP, file transfer protocol was very simple and demanded a tremendous amount of error checking software. E-mail was also old fashioned. We utilised an integral software system package referred to as Pine with Gopher which unfortunately was in addition text-only. There was no Netscape or IE even. My earliest web browser was a package known as Mosaic built by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain.
The pc I used to log onto this old fashioned Internet was a state-of-the-art first-class pc system. It had an entire 20 meg disk drive, 640 kB of memory and turned out to be at its most advantageous, a 12 MHz model. The display had all of four colors per pixel on the computer screen, where the one you have probably has 32; 16 colors where your monitor can display around 16 million. There was initially no such element as high-end pictures. I was so pleased when I bought my initial 300 baud modem which generally is about a bazillion times slower than the DSL line that you’re more than likely using.
The reason that I started off here is to press home the point that every single of us was inside our own individual small universe. It was like we had our own area and short of writing messages on the BBS’s, or dealing with the particularly long, time intensive method of sending an e-mail, we never knew that anybody else existed in our on-line world. A great number of of you don’t comprehend how wonderful you currently have it using the personal pc in the year 2010.
The Present
I’m using a quad-core computer system with a 1 TB disc drive and a monitor capable of presenting 32 million colors to create this. I’ve hardly ever had to touch the pc keyboard or computer mouse except for minimal edits. I’m speaking into my mic and the desktop computer is utilizing a speech-to-text product (Dragon Naturally Speaking) to transcribe it for me.) Any time I work, I work with men or women from around the entire world. When I play, I play with men and women from around the world. The walls between human beings in cyberspace are diminishing really fast!
Computers and the Internet are innovating many of the rules of cultural interaction through social media networks. We have Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and many hundreds of other social media sites easily available to us. We have personal blogs by the millions and we can stumble through internet websites spread throughout 75 million computers with the aid of services along the lines of StumbleUpon in order to look for webpages that we’d certainly not come across otherwise. And great new social media are showing up on a routine basis. The large majority of us have widely used chat software programs of one style or another to chat with persons anywhere around the world. But those mainly help us to chat one-on-one. Twitter allows for us to chat one to many or many to one. Facebook and MySpace let us to post important information about ourselves and construct a network of friends online. And they only scratch the surface.
In case you hadn’t found out, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Almost everything around us is vanishing into our computers. And I mean everything!
The big three networks and print magazines are really going out of business or least experiencing a lot lower share of viewer audience. A great deal of us get the majority of, if not all, of our news online.
Remember the first mobile or portable phone? It was in fact a foot long and weighed about 2 pounds. Currently you can get a hold of one that fits in a pocket or purse and not even know it’s there. And that again, is only a beginning. A great deal of you have more than likely never heard of VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol. It’s merely because of VOIP that our telephone services are disappearing into our computing devices. Ever hear of Vonage? Or Magic-Jack? You grab your phone and call the number and instead of your phone call being routed through the use of the telco lines, they’re sent by means of your computer, out the to Internet and are automagically delivered to the right number.
How many of you can access your bank account to inspect balances for your accounts can do it through the computer? I sure can. Banks love the Internet. They don’t have to have an high priced bank teller look for an account balance, a lower priced computer system can do it for them.
How many customers employ EBay or other shopping online businesses to do at the very least some of their shopping over the internet nowadays? Sears, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart – they all have a webpresence where you can choose gifts and have them Fed-Ex’d or UPS’d to you in a couple of days.
Do you recognize what IPTV stands for? No, not Iowa Public TeleVision. It stands for Internet Protocol, TV. TV is also disappearing into our machines. Wish to embark on your personal television show? Go to UStream.com, get an account, and if you have a webcam and mike, you actually can be on the air in an hour. Ditto, a radio station. Like your own radio station? There’s a website online referred to as live365.com that helps you to set up an Internet radio station in a few hours. It will set you back roughly $125/year. You can set it up to autoplay your favourite music or you can DJ it all, and add advertising of your own throughout the mix, and if you set it up in accordance to their guidlines, they will even take care of all royalty prices..
Don’t have confidence in your credit information on the Internet? Start a brand-new bank account, dump a few hundred greenbacks into it and make your acquisitions working with the money card that comes with every different account. Begin a Paypal.com account, tie it into your new bank account or debit card and *POOF*, you can purchase almost anything the Internet has to offer. There’s nothing less difficult.
Here’s the kicker. If you can figure out a basic 3D graphics computer software similar to that of Google SketchUp, you will be able to go to shapeways.com and they’ll actually produce a genuine item for you, that you should be able to put on the market and they’ll dispatch it anyplace in the world. The receipts are dumped into your main paypal account, after they take their split, and it’s a incredibly small split.
Doubt not that the community all around us is vanishing into our desktop computers. In 20 years, we probably will not recognize the business world as it stands.
The Future
As our business considerations are evaporating into our computer, our personal relationships are as well. My family is are spread around all over the States. But we all now have our Facebook pages tied connected so even when we can’t get together we can still connect.
If you’d honestly like to see what the future of social media is, go to http://www.secondlife.com and download their client, then connect. You’ll discover a full 3D world there ın which you can interact with folks from around the world. You can talk to them, form social relationships with them through 3D avatars, build items, have your own online home, business and anything else you can imagine.
It’s primitive and clunky, (It seems to take forever to get around – though that may just have been my computer), but most things are primitive and clunky at the start. Give that 5 to 10 years and it’ll be the new way that we communicate in the near term future.
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While it is true that the distribution model for content is changing, the broadcast model will still have its place in the plethora of distribution options. Take it from me, the Director of Engineering for Iowa Public Television. We were IPTV before it was cool.
Bill