2 posts tagged “new year”
I just got some photos back from the "80s prom" themed New Year's party we went to. Do you like my sleeves? Oh, and how about the honey's 'stache?
The New York Times had a really interesting article about people's predictions for the next hundred years (as well as predictions people made in 1908 about 2008).
I haven't spent a ton of time thinking through what I'd predict, but here are some of my own general ideas:
- The World Wide Web will be exponentially more useful than it is today. It will be a lot more like a real web of information, and less linear. Instead of having one or a couple of ways to navigate information (the typical way you navigate a website today), there will be many ways to follow information paths and conceptualize information, just like what's shown in CSS Zen Garden. This can all be done today, through CSS... just not widely adopted. Wouldn't it be nice if the user could choose how to view the website, instead of the developer? This is especially helpful for users with diverse needs like the hearing- or vision-impaired. I wish I could credit this idea to myself. However, it's really the idea of my honey's math professor friend... and I think he's right on the money with this one. The honey brought up another important idea: a standard could be developed to implement this, so that website developers would be incented to design with multiple CSS layouts.
- Mobile devices will become the administrative center of our lives. This is pretty obvious. Computers and home electronics devices will still be used for everything you want a big screen/keyboard or nice speakers for, but the mobile phone will port everything.
- Search engines, applications, and advertising will all be much more personalized. You won't have to go looking for things you want, because there will be models for your usage behavior. Computers will probably know more about you than your family does.
- We'll have a depression or a serious recession that will deeply affect the character of our nation, just like the Great Depression. This will have negative and some positive outcomes -- we'll become less of a consumer-crazed society and be forced to rely on self-sufficiency.
- The U.S. will start opening the doors to massive immigration, in order to supply a population of young workers to support social security for all our retiring baby boomers.
So, what are your predictions?
