{"id":10888,"date":"2007-11-02T03:03:30","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T00:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/02\/what-is-the-future-of-communication\/"},"modified":"2007-11-02T03:03:30","modified_gmt":"2007-11-02T00:03:30","slug":"what-is-the-future-of-communication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/02\/what-is-the-future-of-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the future of communication?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ngtech.gr\/blog\/en\/\">Nikos<\/a> pinged me just in time about the <a href=\"http:\/\/micromediameetup.pbwiki.com\/\">MicroMedia 5 minute meetup<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s basically a virtual meeting of a bunch of people, who each provide their own answer to one specific question.\u00c2\u00a0 Since the meetup is virtual, the answers should have been provided virtually as well.\u00c2\u00a0 And since it was all about micromedia, it was logical to expect micromedia tools to be used.\u00c2\u00a0 The question this time was: &#8220;<strong>What is the future of communication?<\/strong>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s one broad question if seen from all perspectives.\u00c2\u00a0 To avoid a non-stop thinking exercise, I limited myself to a version like &#8220;<em>What is the future of communication from micro media point of view?<\/em>&#8220;.\u00c2\u00a0 For those of you, who don&#8217;t know what micro media is all about, here is a quote from the meetup wiki:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Text: Microblogging tools like Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, or Text messages<\/li>\n<li>Audio: Twitter Gram, Utterz, Audioblogger, or other<\/li>\n<li>Images: Get creative here, can you tell a story from photos?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>These tools rushed into our digital lives recently, and got a large and important place there.\u00c2\u00a0 The applications of these tools vary from personal notes to corporate meetings, but most people use these for communication purposes.\u00c2\u00a0 So, here are the questions that I got thinking about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How are these tools going to change in the future?<\/li>\n<li>Will we get some new ones?\u00c2\u00a0 Will the old ones stay?\u00c2\u00a0 How much will those that will stay change?<\/li>\n<li>What kind of tools will people prefer and why?<\/li>\n<li>How will these tools be utilized?<\/li>\n<li>How will people&#8217;s lives change because of these tools?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is a lot that I can say\u00c2\u00a0 answering these, but most of it will be just water with no proof or reason to it.\u00c2\u00a0 For me it&#8217;s mostly based on personal experiences and feelings, rather then any specific studies or statistical data or anything like that.<\/p>\n<p>Before I go on, here is <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/mamchenkov\/statuses\/381620782\">the short answer<\/a> the meetup question that I posted to Twitter.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Twitter-type short text services with open API and mobile\/SMS integration will rule the future for a long time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, for the long story.<\/p>\n<p>I think plain text will dominate images, video, and sound for a very long time.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s not going to change in any foreseeable future.\u00c2\u00a0 I think so because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Text is way <strong>easier to produce<\/strong>. Most of electronic devices these days have some sort of keyboard attached.\u00c2\u00a0 Text can be easily produced in a number of ways &#8211; full featured keyboard, simple mobile phone like keyboard, one button keyboard with a cycle through the alphabet, mouse\/joystick pointer, speech to text conversion, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Text is way <strong>easier to search<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 Modern search engines are at the point of extracting meaning (when you tell them &#8220;car&#8221;, they understand that you mean &#8220;car&#8221;, &#8220;automobile&#8221;, &#8220;vehicle&#8221; and so on. When you tell them &#8220;the sound of bass&#8221;, they understand that you are probably talking about music rather than fishing).<\/li>\n<li>Text is much <strong>easier to consume<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people won&#8217;t have troubles recognizing parts of the texts without reading them through letter by letter.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people skip chunks of texts when reading longer pieces.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people won&#8217;t have any troubles reading several texts at the same time.<\/li>\n<li>Text is <strong>more portable and accessible<\/strong>. Read it from the screen or print it out or even re-write it by hand.\u00c2\u00a0 Devices that are needed to move text around are much cheaper and simpler than those for sound and video.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, most people will prefer short chunks of text to long chunks of text.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;d rather read two sentences and move on to the next news section or topic, than spend three days trying to figure out what the author is trying to say.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people I know will have hard times writing an article one page long on any subject at all.\u00c2\u00a0 All the same people will have no problem spitting out a sentence or two.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, on any subject at all.<\/p>\n<p>Because of the above, I think that <strong>short text services will blossom<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 And they already grow\u00c2\u00a0 pretty fast.<\/p>\n<p>Which of these are better?\u00c2\u00a0 Those that are simpler to use.\u00c2\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\">Twitter<\/a> is doing a really good job here. One large text box, one submit button, and a counter of how many characters you have left for this message.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing more.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s difficult to make it even simpler.<\/p>\n<p>But ease of use shouldn&#8217;t be only for the end user.\u00c2\u00a0 It should be from all sides of the service.\u00c2\u00a0 And again Twitter is doing a pretty good job of it. \u00c2\u00a0 It has a simple and straightforward API, which allows programmers to create applications for this service in just a few lines of code (a few is as in one or two lines of code).\u00c2\u00a0 It has an RSS feed for everything, so it&#8217;s easy to get things out of it.\u00c2\u00a0 It has plenty of automation &#8211; TinyURL integration, direct messages, tracking, etc.\u00c2\u00a0 It has SMS integration, so it&#8217;s easy to use on the move.<\/p>\n<p>Stuff like that will be at the top of micro media, I think.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, other technologies will move forward, as they always do.\u00c2\u00a0 It will be easier and easier to create and move around sounds, videos, and whatever else is there.\u00c2\u00a0 Devices will get smaller.\u00c2\u00a0 Connections will get faster.\u00c2\u00a0 The content will get richer.<\/p>\n<p>But, as with many other things, the limiting factor won&#8217;t be in the technologies.\u00c2\u00a0 It will be in people.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about images for example.\u00c2\u00a0 Those were with us for thousands of years.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet, only a few of us can draw a semi-decent picture.\u00c2\u00a0 And photography is of no help here.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of terrible images out there show as to how effective we are with cameras.\u00c2\u00a0 We see things in 3D.\u00c2\u00a0 Images are 2D.\u00c2\u00a0 The software will hardly ever do a proper conversion.\u00c2\u00a0 And humans will hardly spend the time learning about the topic to do it themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Videos are even more complex &#8211; we can&#8217;t manage static pictures properly, and now we have a full power to work with moving images.\u00c2\u00a0 Sounds aren&#8217;t much different.<\/p>\n<p>People are buying multi-core multi-CPU hi-end machines and use them to play minesweeper mostly.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 You give them a mobile phone which can control half of the universe, and they won&#8217;t even bother about an address book in it.\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t think this will ever change.\u00c2\u00a0 Things might improve both from the people&#8217;s and technology&#8217;s sides, but the huge gap will always be there.<\/p>\n<p>These are my thoughts on how this whole micro media communication will play out in the future&#8230;<\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p>Nikos pinged me just in time about the MicroMedia 5 minute meetup.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s basically a virtual meeting of a bunch of people, who each provide their own answer to one specific question.\u00c2\u00a0 Since the meetup is virtual, the answers should have been provided virtually as well.\u00c2\u00a0 And since it was all about micromedia, it was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/02\/what-is-the-future-of-communication\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What is the future of communication?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,62],"tags":[90,79,2416,1111],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-10888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-technology","tag-communications","tag-people","tag-thoughts","tag-twitter"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11213,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/06\/01\/virtual-presence-with-twitter\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":0},"title":"Virtual presence with Twitter","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"June 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Twitter is many things to many people.\u00a0 It's a lot of things to me too (status updates, communication channel, notes application, self-reminders, etc). But for the last couple of days I am having a new experience with it - virtual presence. Last year I attended Greek Blogger Camp.\u00a0 It was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25049,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2015\/12\/12\/how-far-can-you-go-with-haproxy-and-a-t2-micro\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":1},"title":"How Far Can You Go With HAProxy and a t2.micro","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"December 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's an interesting set of experiments trying to answer the question of how far can you go with HAProxy setup on the smallest of the Amazon EC2 instances - t2.micro (1 virtual CPU, 1 GB of RAM). \u00a0Here's the summary. At 460 req\/second response times are mostly a flat ~300\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"460 requests\/second","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/460loader-500x261.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11077,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/28\/feeding-on-friends-with-friendfeedcom\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":2},"title":"Feeding on friends with FriendFeed.com","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"February 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the things that people on the web do is follow each other.\u00c2\u00a0 Reading blog posts, watching favorite video clips, stare at shared photos, reply to comments, get status updates, and so on and so forth. In the previous years, the number of people who were online was much\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15393,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/16\/on-working-remotely\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":3},"title":"On working remotely","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"August 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Here are a few notes on working remotely from a person who has first hand experience with that: In terms of communication I think remote employees are a massive benefit to a company, it is easy in an office to forget about proper communications channels because you can bypass them\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18240,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2013\/05\/27\/happy-10th-birthday-wordpress\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":4},"title":"Happy 10th birthday, WordPress!","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"May 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Today is the WordPress Day. \u00a0Thousands and thousands of people gather in hundreds of cities and towns all over the world to celebrate WordPress's 10th birthday. \u00a0In 10 years, WordPress went from just another PHP application for bloggers to a feature-rich platform that runs a huge chunk of the Web.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"wordpress 10 years old","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/wordpress-10-years-old-500x66.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":28588,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2018\/05\/19\/pvm-php-process-virtual-machine-for-building-and-executing-workflows\/","url_meta":{"origin":10888,"position":5},"title":"pvm &#8211; PHP Process virtual machine for building and executing workflows","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"May 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"At some point last year I wrote the blog post titled \"Getting started with workflows in PHP\".\u00a0 I received quite a bit of feedback about it, but, unfortunately, the priorities at work shifted and I haven't done much more with workflows since than. The world, however, hasn't stopped.\u00a0 The tools\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/pizza-process-500x211.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10888"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keyring_services?post=10888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}