Next up was Alan Noble, from Google. Did you know? Google maps was started in Oz. He reckons that gadgets are the latest – a.k.a. widgets. They're mini-applications, ad are becoming the new building blocks of a whole new web.
Google culture dictates, “There’s never an end to innovation. Things can always be better, more user-friendly, etc.” It reminds me of Pam... the chilled-out perfectionist who inspires better results because she has the confidence to believe in them. Maybe mediocrity can never happen if it's not allowed to happen.
Jonathan Haagen from the Economist Intelligence Unit mentioned that nowadays there is no such thing as “virtual reality.” It got me thinking about how the Internet has totally blurred the boundaries between presence and absence... how the confirmation of our sense of being is now attached to somewhere beyond the immediate.
The computer is now a small army of positions that used to be filled by real people - postman, bank clerk, bookstore assistant. The screen has cost us those social interactions. We can't even mark the lines of reality anymore: when you check your bank statement online, it's a real number, a real bank, a real customer..."real" in the off-line sense. Is there even a difference?
On a similar note, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb said that pages are no longer center of the web, now data and services are. He mentioned the onset of the semantic web – machines talking to machines, and making the web more “intelligent”. A semantic application, I learned, determines the meaning of text and other data, and then creates connections for users.
He mentioned that the magic of Facebook was “the global mapping of everyone and how they are related” and this linked to Jonathan’s point about how our offline selves and the social furniture of our lives are increasingly translated into the online world.
As people travel more and more, I don't think an old-fashioned address book cuts it. You need more than just the details of people you meet on journeys, you want to remember how you're linked, the mutual friends, etc... it's as if globalisation's making socialising so much more insanely multi-layered that Facebook becomes a need instead of a luxury; a method of preservation in a world that's moving faster than we can keep up with alone.
Google culture dictates, “There’s never an end to innovation. Things can always be better, more user-friendly, etc.” It reminds me of Pam... the chilled-out perfectionist who inspires better results because she has the confidence to believe in them. Maybe mediocrity can never happen if it's not allowed to happen.
Jonathan Haagen from the Economist Intelligence Unit mentioned that nowadays there is no such thing as “virtual reality.” It got me thinking about how the Internet has totally blurred the boundaries between presence and absence... how the confirmation of our sense of being is now attached to somewhere beyond the immediate.
The computer is now a small army of positions that used to be filled by real people - postman, bank clerk, bookstore assistant. The screen has cost us those social interactions. We can't even mark the lines of reality anymore: when you check your bank statement online, it's a real number, a real bank, a real customer..."real" in the off-line sense. Is there even a difference?
On a similar note, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb said that pages are no longer center of the web, now data and services are. He mentioned the onset of the semantic web – machines talking to machines, and making the web more “intelligent”. A semantic application, I learned, determines the meaning of text and other data, and then creates connections for users.
He mentioned that the magic of Facebook was “the global mapping of everyone and how they are related” and this linked to Jonathan’s point about how our offline selves and the social furniture of our lives are increasingly translated into the online world.
As people travel more and more, I don't think an old-fashioned address book cuts it. You need more than just the details of people you meet on journeys, you want to remember how you're linked, the mutual friends, etc... it's as if globalisation's making socialising so much more insanely multi-layered that Facebook becomes a need instead of a luxury; a method of preservation in a world that's moving faster than we can keep up with alone.
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