Sounds like some of us are waking up from the coma that is the last twenty years of personal computing. The files and folders metaphor took off like wildfire because it represented a total departure from the command line user interface. The introduction of a GUI allowed a larger percentage of humanity to adopt technology, which in turn made the tech community much more exciting and diverse.
Today our desktops are all interconnected, and a slew of different devices have evolved from the desktop and grown into our backpacks, our cars, and our pockets. Most of the popular uses of these machines no longer involve organizing all our files into folders. All of our memos, timesheets, photos, movies have been left in a petri dish with Email, IM, WiFi, and GPS–It’s all merged together but hasn’t quite gotten the entreprenurial rubdown it needs.
Jeremy Zawodny has talked about three problems that need solving, so he’s certainly clued in. Applications need to be built for the web and the desktop equally, the archipeligo of devices need interoperability, and someone needs to build and support an OS that accepts the networked reality of personal computing.
In more particular terms, Ross Rubin is calling it PC 3.0: the social computer. It would leverage all the bleeding edge technologies to create a more natural interaction method. He reminds us of the double decade old promise of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video (Where did you want to go yesterday?)
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