The Future of the Internet

I was thinking the other day about the future of the internet. What direction does it seem to be going? What are people currently doing on the internet and what will people probably be doing ten years from now?

The answer is of course, "I don't know" and no one, for that matter, really does know. It's a relatively new science, and could even be considered a new "organism" for that matter. By organism I don't mean to suggest anything as science fiction as iRobot or anything to that nature. Instead I consider it to be an organism in the same way that I consider advertising, television, radio and general business to be organisms. They all grow by feeding off of things around them. Most pop-culture mediums could be considered organisms in that they feed off of the mind of people that invest time and money into them.

However when a real organism feeds and then grows, the item by which it fed off of has now been destroyed. This does not seem to be true for pop-culture organisms such as the internet. For example, if a woman invests her time into building a social network, the social network grows but her time has not been destroyed. She invested her time and now she can keep in touch with her friends. She created her MySpace/Facebook/YouTube account for herself and now she gets something out of it for free. And at the same time the organism that is the social network has grown, but not at the price of the woman who gave her time.

But wait, where does the funding come for all these social networks? Advertising right? Money is handed off so the network must feed off of money, right? Well, even then money isn't really consumed it's traded for value. Both the social network and the company buying advertising space gets something out of the deal so nothing is really destroyed for the sake of something bigger.

So I sat and thought about this for awhile, and if the internet is an organism how does it evolve? Of course, this led me back to the conclusion that ultimately "I don't know". It still is as new of a science as it was five minutes ago. But for the sake of discussion let's look at the short history that it does have.

In the 1990's the big thing was online shopping. It was a new and amazing idea that anyone with a 56K connection could buy their Christmas and birthday presents from the comfort of their own home without even changing out of their pajamas. Everyone was sure that the future of the internet was online shopping. But then as most of you know, the market was over-saturated with online stores and most of them ended up going out of business. Only the strong online stores survived and continued to make revenue off of their product. There are still a lot of online shopping companies but no one would consider it to be the center of the internet.

Enter Web 2.0! The future of the internet is definitely social networking. We're sure of that now! ...right? How many social networks are you a part of? How many social networks exist? A LOT. In fact there are more than most people think or even recognize.

Now recall what I mentioned earlier about how advertisers trade money for value by buying ad space on social networking sites. A lot of these companies buying ad space are none other than the online stores that have gained their balance from the bubble burst of the 1990's, or better yet, are new companies that learned from the bubble burst and developed a better business plan. They may not be the future of the internet but they're still around. And now they seem to be working with social networking sites that are currently rumored to be the future of the internet.

So will social networking sites be doomed to experience the same fate as the online shopping sites of yesteryear? Maybe. Maybe not. I still don't know, and I don't claim to know. My best guess is that they're probably not going to be the future of the internet. Instead the market will probably get over-saturated and another bubble will burst. However, just as the strongest online stores survived the first bubble burst, I'm sure we'll see some survivors come out of this one alive.

This still doesn't completely answer the question of "how does this organism evolve". I'd like to think of it like pouring dish soup into a sink and then turning on the water. At first an explosion of new bubbles begin to appear and grow. But they can only grow so much before they burst. However when they burst they do not disappear. Instead the suds stick around and help out the new bubbles that seem to forming. This cycle continues as the huge mound of bubbles grows bigger and bigger, not off of one big bubble, but instead off of the millions of small ones. Every single bubble that forms is expected to break. But after all, the most important part isn't each individual bubble, but the huge mound that the sum of all bubbles form.

Home Threatre Setup

As most guys do, I like to tinker with gadgets. However my newest project is seeming to be a bit of a head-scratcher. Maybe you guys can help me out with it.

Ultimately, as an end result I would like to be able to load all my DVD's onto my computer along side my music library. The goal of this is to store all forms of entertainment media onto one, easily searchable, easily maintainable, source (e.g. my computer). This is easy enough to do considering I can simply rip all my movies using a ripping program, so getting the movies onto my computer isn't my concern, and naturally getting music onto my computer in this day and age shouldn't be any big mystery either.

My concern is that, with all my media in one spot, I would like to be able to double-click on a movie on my computer and have it play on my television. Along the same idea I would also like to double click on a music playlist and have that play over my stereo. The problem is that the computer that I would like to house all this media is in my home office and my television set and stereo are in my living room.

This is a problem. I can easily connect my television as a second monitor using the right gadgets and I can very easily connect my stereo to my computer, but that's not the problem at hand. The television needs to not only be independent of the computer, but in an entirely different room. It also needs to be able to act entirely like a TV should so that if a guest comes to stay they can just turn it on and start watching cable TV. Also when TVs are connected as second monitors they often lose the quality of picture and this is not a fair sacrifice.

I do have a partial solution. I have an old computer that was built right before XP came out (yes, that's an old computer - who's feeling the gray hairs poke through). I can put that computer in the living room and connect it to my network. Then I can go onto my office computer (the one with all my movies and songs) and share the directory that holds all the media. This will allow me to go onto the living room computer and access the movies/songs over the network. After that, I just have to get the movie to output to one of the audio/video ports on the back of the television set computer. Then I can probably just do something similar for my music.

But alas, there's more...

The living room computer still resides on a desk that is far away from the television. To avoid having wires go all over my living room, I would also like to figure out a way to do all of this wirelessly.


...Any thougts???