Assured future.

It's an easy matter to make one prediction in the area of what we will be doing with our time in the very near future.

All you need to do is take a few things we're already doing, and put them together to discover how they'll converge.

Twitter: the updating service that sends what you're doing to anyone who cares to know, wherever they happen to be, via their phones.

Flock, the browser that sucks information from all of your contacts on Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter and feeds them to you in a single constantly-updated stream.

And the iPhone, the phone that presents photos and videos in a quality far more advanced than any other phone on the market.

Combine these three technologies and what have you got? It's not too difficult to imagine, in the next year or so, a mobile version of Flock where your phone will be constantly lighting up with all sorts of information from your friends and contacts. Status updates, new photos they've posted, new videos they've uploaded, information as to their location... your phone screen will be a constant feed of information.

We already have pushmail, where emails arrive in your inbox without you needing to do anything. It's only a small leap from that to push-updates, with all new information in whatever form posted by your contacts appearing instantly on your iPhone screen.

Fun.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Soap operation

I've been trying for a while to work out just what it is that's so great about Facebook, Twitter et al; these totally addictive sites that have millions of people logging in at all times of the day.

I could feel that there is a big idea particularly behind Twitter but couldn't work it out. But it's only becoming clear to me what that idea is now.

It's a 24-hour a day reality show. But one where you know all of the actors.

Hook up to Twitter, subscribe to your friends' feeds, enable your mobile phone for updates. Suddenly you've got a rolling news service, a constant feed of information and entertainment, from trivial activity reports to profound innermost thoughts, all delivered to your phone screen.

It's better than any movie or 24-hour reality show there is. Because you get to choose the characters, who's included in the stories, and you personally know everybody in the cast. With the added advantage that you don't need to sit in front of the TV to keep up with it.

Download Flock to your computer and the story gets even better. Flock is just another web browser like Safari or Firefox, but with a few added features; one of which is a feed bar constantly sucking information from all of your contacts on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and a bunch of other sites. You can literally sit in front of your computer screen watching the news constantly come in: friends' status updates, contacts' Twitter reports, friends' new videos, new photos... It's an amazing sight. Like the CNN News Ticker, but with all the stories involving people you're connected to personally.

It's much more entertaining than watching the telly.

Blogged with the Flock Browser