I’m web inspired. A junkie almost.
Since the moment I first connected, I’ve been driven to build stuff that is fueled by the web as a runway for human potential. Been enraptured with its community possibilities. Firmly on the speeding train of a changed, always connected, and better world.
The idea of a globally local community has transformed my life in tangible ways.
Something has changed though.
The dramatic potential of the web as a platform for connecting and seamlessly transacting pales in comparison to the immense possibility of what it can do for us at the street level. And how little it actually does today.
When people talk about mobile, I think about a connected human touch. When people talk about apps, I pine for something that connects, not just informs. Something that is actionable beyond a transaction or a reservation.
I think there is an evolutionary turn at play here.
Think about it.
We’ve pushed everything transactionable online. From cars to artisanal honey, from telephone services to dating. Databases are the sinews of the web with transactional hooks that level the tangle of real world obfuscation around access to and delivery of most every hard good for sale.
We’ve built a definitive science around parsing traffic data, and codified the behavioral assumptions about the when, why and value of every click to a shopping cart.
And in the current social renaissance of behavioral awareness, we’ve put a human face behind every action online. Today even the techiest realize that the web is all about the people, not the platform. Even the biggest brains in the data crunching world realize that understanding extended human behavior and applying it through marketing is key to building markets.
Data is just the wave, the rider is the consumer.
I’m still enthralled and work with the humanization of connections and commerce online every day. I’m unabashed about my childish enthusiasm for each new marketplace that surfaces in yet another niche of needs. I’m excited that the stranglehold of transactional charges online that make the most innovative ideas still slave to the core financial institutions is being circumvented.
But… I’m really most inspired by the unchartered wild west of possibilities that is happening right in front of me on the street. Where the meshing of a digital web and a very-much-so analog life is starting to be played out at a raw, very early stage.
There have been a new wave of posts lately about Internet fatigue and how it makes us pine for more human contact. There’s a new surge of interest, especially in the video chat world, in making the connections online more real, more visceral and less virtual.
I think the real key is not pushing data to the web to let us play in that humanized cyber sandbox. It’s pushing the data and connections from the web down, so it informs us with the power of information, but in a more real context. Not in web terms but in human terms.
A truly interesting phenomenon has taken place.
We’ve built a digital mirror of select pieces of the real world. We’ve done amazing things with conversations and communities to come ever closer to real human connections online.
But walking down the street, focused on the intimate and contextually defined space of my phone, tech is action and apps are tools and community happens…well, much as it used to.
The future is less about making it more visceral and real online, and more about making it more informed and natural on our digital devices right here on the street as I jump out of the subway.
Somewhere in this changing current is why I rarely feel the need to disconnect. My dream vacation is not one without a phone. My ideal world is where connections inform the real and conform to the context of my life seamlessly, not move me away from the experience at the moment.
I’m responding emotionally to an intellectual curiosity of how to switch the mirror, how to trade places and refocus our attention to make tech more the servant and us less the metaphor.
What’s missing is not technology hooks but possibly a new language as a connector.
I’m interested in companies that are trying to crack the natural language code of a mobile reality . Not voice recognition but a language that lets me communicate what I’m thinking on a mobile device, as I think it. Without the mental truncations needed for Twitter or the iconization of everything as an image of Instagram or Facebook.
Sometimes both the truncated phrase and the capture image work and amaze, usually they are noise badly in need of a filter.
This is a really hard want.
Creating context on a device too small for our input is a paradox. Creating community amongst users while still needing to establish instant context in a personal space the size of a phone is daunting at best.
And the hardest: taking the geographically flat landscape of the the web and using it as a tool to connect people geo adjacent to each other. And the Philosopher’s Stone for every terrestrial business, connecting the customers both geo adjacent and behaviorally inclined with merchants just around the corner.
As hard as this is, the upside is a change as great as the web has changed our life to date.
And as hard as it is, it is less unimaginable honestly than the world as it is today looked just a half a generation ago.
