Ubiquity and the Web of Things
One of the areas of computing that I’m drawn towards is the convergence of humans and machines in ambient or ubiquitous environments. I’m drawn to the possibilities of what we can achieve as human beings and to the challenges we are going to be faced with as human beings. Timo Arnall has an excellent set of slides on Slideshare titled The web in the world in which he discusses these environments and their potential, the issues of visibility, context, scarcity and the design challenge of developing for the Web of Things.
The Web, we should all understand, is not going to be a city of silo websites that operate like empty boutique stores. These segregated silos will no doubt exist but they will pale into insignificance against the backdrop of the Web of Things, or the One Web (One Machine) in which the world’s largest distributed network achieves it’s potential. We’ll make more and more things that use the Web for communication, information sharing and to enhance our everyday experiences in the context of who we are, where we are and what we happen to be out to achieve. The Web of Things that intercommunicate and share their lesser abilities to mutual software and hardware benefit.
It might be easy even at this point to brush aside the idea of a world full of invisible computers humming away in the background. News flash, we’re already there. Our modern cars have about 40 computers and we hardly notice them. What about moving that into a clock that automatically knows your birthday, has facial recognition software and provides personalised greetings dependant on age, your mood, or in light of recent events. You don’t want a clock wishing you a cheerful Happy Birthday after you went to a family funeral. But you’re right, such a clock is a gimmick, a mere toy. A triviality.
Can you think of a thousand things that might be contextually useful on a mobile phone? Easy. How about context aware marketing where posters display information or advertising relevant to you and your choices and what you are likely to be interested in reading. Not because it was programmed to think for you, but because it is just smart enough to pull some information here and a snippet of an application there and come up with useful stuff. We’re looking at a world where the distributed environment is going to also challenge our security and privacy. Applications will interact with other applications and with our actual real world environments. An exciting prospect and a dangerous one.
We’re about to stop going to the Internet (or the Web) to do things. We’re migrating to a world where we look into the One Web, along with our Things. It’s going to lose place, and be everywhere. Your software agents will find out what you need and your hardware agents will provide you with the services in your home, worklife and anywhere else.
If you’re interested in web technologies – don’t blinker yourself to the possibilities by imagining the Web as that city of silos. It’s indeed an exciting time in history. And a very dangerous one. Even more dangerous because to most of us this will be an almost invisible computing environment, on purpose. Don’t think keyboard and mouse; do think gestures and intentions. And think business opportunities…
