When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

As part of my recent love affair with the iPhone, I've gotten very interested in augmented reality. 
I LOVE a novel and engaging way to present data to people--it's been my job for pretty much the last 7 years, so it's really cool to see some genuine innovation in this area.

I've mentioned augmented reality once or twice before, and the buzz on it has been building lately, not many people I've talked to have heard about it yet.  So I figure I'll drop my 2 cents on the matter.

Augmented reality is simply overlaying digital displays on the real world, typically using a mobile device as the viewport.  So instead of a completely virtual world you have the real world with virtual overlays.  This video actually describes it much better than any explanation could:

Not only can this type of overlay be done on top of public areas and rooms, but you can also overlay virtual objects on well-defined spaces, such as on a piece of paper sitting on your desktop:

Augmented reality is much closer than I would have imagined even a year ago, I totally missed the significance of having direct access to a mobile video stream.  There are a few technical hurdles to application development, mostly around the speed of mobile devices, but those are being attacked and solved one by one every day.  The image processing and recognition, 3D virtual browser displays, and toolkits are now available and can be used in real applications today.

The iPhone OS isn't scheduled to support direct access to the video feed until the next release, and that's required for augmented reality apps.  (Although I understand that several of these apps are already available today on Android devices.)  I suspect that after that release hits you're going to see a flood of these applications, and I'm really looking forward to it. 

I'm looking forward to integrating the real world into my apps as well.

A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.

Um, that should really be Reporting ON the Future, but I thought this title was cooler :)

Anyway, what was the last thing you got really technically geeked out about?  (I'd really actually like to know, if you feel like sharing.  I dig stuff people are excited about.)

I mean, what was the last thing you saw that really made you say "wow, this is really going to change things"?

I haven't had one of those moments in a while but I'm learning something now that has me feeling that way.  You know, when you start thinking of the potential implications and it just takes things to a whole new level.

We bought my brother a vintage 1944 Underwood typewriter for Christmas.  I hadn't played with a typewriter in probably 15 years, and it was bizarre trying to write something on it.  I never realized just how much the text I put down tends to change and rearrange itself as it flows out of my head, thru my fingers, and onto the screen.

As I write something I jot down a couple of words to capture an idea, write a sentence or two about them, go back to the beginning, drag paragraphs around, and delete entire sections.  My workflow is flatly impossible on a typewriter.

I realized that if this typewriter was the tool that I had to work with there's no way I'd be generating as much content as I do.  It's just far too time-consuming and requires far too much planning in advance to generate a polished final product.

One of the innovations I'm really looking forward to from a personal standpoint is the ability to do personal reverse auction on the Net.  I think they'd really be handy when it comes to picking up bargains after deflation has ravaged the country for another few months.

In case you're not familiar with reverse auctions, it's where you place a bid for something and let sellers find you, instead of sellers posting an item for sale and you placing a bid with them.

Seems simple, right?  It should be, but we don't have the infrastructure for it.  In order for this to be a universally useful function it needs to be baked into the Web stack.  Right now, it's not.  The method for publishing your wishlist doesn't exist yet, and then there's the little issue of how people will discover your wishlist--Google won't cut it. 

RDF and linked data provide a perfectly wonderful way to discover these reverse auctions eventually, but that's only part of the equation.

A post by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch today really got me riled up:  The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site.  This was up in the air until yesterday:

Yesterday, the SEC issued its formal cease-and-desist letter (embedded below or download PDF), outlining its reasoning for characterizing Prosper as a seller of investment, something prosper had vigorously resisted in the past by arguing that it was merely a marketplace matching lenders and borrowers. But the SEC is having none of that.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is an exact rerun of what happened with the original Napster and the music industry, only worse in my opinion.

The key here is that Prosper itself was not lending or borrowing, it was simply matching up willing borrowers and willing borrowers.  It also provided additional services such as collection and tracking.  The HORROR.

The real fact is, if private citizens were allowed to freely lend to one another, the private banking cartel that is our central banking system would lose the little control they have over the economy.  The free  market would freely set interest rates and people and businesses would be free to do an end-run around our corrupt and bloated financial system.  The financial engineering that has allowed Wall Street to siphon off trillions of dollars in profit at our expense would be crippled.  The SEC is simply acting as the enforcement arm of our private national banking cartel.

Don't fall under the protection of the cartel?  Goodnight, chump.

About two years ago now (wow...) I wrote a post about my fragmented online identity, and all of the pieces of it scattered across the Internet.  The list at that time was pretty big:

• My blog
• My LinkedIn profile
• My Flickr account
• My YouTube account
• My XBox 360 profile
• My Yahoo IM account
• My ICQ IM account
• My Gmail account
• My Latigent (work) account
• My personal (jason+NOSPAM@jasonkolb.com) account
• My TypePad account
• My BlogLines account
• My Google account
• My Microsoft Passport account
• My bank accounts
• My other bank's accounts
• My brokerage account
• My Amazon account
• My eBay account
• The bazillions of forums I'm registered to

Since that post my online identity has only grown even more fragmented due to all of the different sites I have added to my roster.  (Well, except for the Latigent account--that one's dead now, replaced with my Cisco email account.)  I've since added a Twitter account, a Digg account, a Reddit account, a forex brokerage account, an options brokerage account, a LibraryThing account, a Jott account, and a Google GrandCentral account.  And those are only the ones I use on a regular basis, not the throwaway accounts for checking out a service.  If you add those into the mix I've probably literally added well over 100 accounts to my identity in the past couple of years.

Solutions like OpenID work great--when they're supported.  I set up jasonkolb.com as my OpenID, and I LOVE it when sites support OpenID.  I don't have to remember yet another account, I just plug in "www.jasonkolb.com" and I'm done.  And it's linked to my permanent identity, so I can switch OpenID providers with NO problem at ANY time.  Unfortunately, sites that support OpenID are still in the minority.  Companies like to pay lip service to single sign-on by allowing their accounts to be used as OpenID's but not accepting OpenID's themselves.  Bah, hypocrites.  Two steps forward, one step back... such is life, I guess.

I still firmly believe that ultimately your online identity will revolve around a single URI that you own, and OpenID has made some great strides in that respect.  This concept is still in the nascent stages, but you can certainly see where it's pointing, and that's exciting.

One aspect of online identity that I don't see discussed often is the intersection of personal and corporate identity.  I think the technology is certainly available to make this happen, after all OpenID is nothing but a layer of abstraction that removes the authentication plumbing from the application.  Enterprise apps could certainly just hand off to OpenID for authentication and companies could be rid of user provisioning altogether, except to turn access on and off.  Creating an internal OpenID provider would be dead simple, using public OpenID providers gets even more interesting.  It would allow people to use the exact same set of credentials when they're working and playing.

The only reason I can see why a company would NOT want to do this is for security reasons.  When applications hand off user security to OpenID, they're making the assumption that the user's OpenID account is secure.  In this scenario, the chain is only as strong as the user's OpenID provider.  If the OpenID provider doesn't force the user to use complex passwords, change their password every 90 days, etc, I don't think this will fly in the corporate world, as nice as it would be.

The solution to this, however, is relatively simple, and I think presents an interesting business opportunity for a large company.  A public OpenID provider that conforms to Sarbanes-Oxley security standards would be secure AND would certainly work as the employee's personal OpenID provider as well.  For example, if Cisco were to offer a public, secure OpenID provider that enforces enterprise security I could simply redirect jasonkolb.com to that provider and bang I'm done.  Cisco could even use its existing Active Directory to authenticate me, the only difference would be that I'd be using that account for both my internal AND external accounts.  All of the sites I currently use my OpenID for wouldn't even know the difference, I could use my OpenID for internal secure applications, and the Cisco enterprise group policy would be enforced for every single application I used OpenID to authenticate against.  Beautiful.

As I wrote before, there are some business opportunities only available to the big boys in the market who have something a startup can't buy--trust.  This is one of those opportunities.  Here is an opportunity for a large company to leverage its position as a trusted entity to both create a new market and move the industry as a whole forward in the process.  Hopefully somebody will pick this idea up and run with it, because I'm sick of managing all of these accounts :)

Working at Cisco is a new experience for me, as far as the size of the company.  Prior to Cisco the largest company I worked for was around 5000 people.  Lately I have been thinking of the advantages of being a big, well-known company, and how those advantages can be leveraged in new ways.  I have found that there are many things a startup can do that a larger company simply cannot because of size, but there are opportunities larger companies have to leverage their brand which are closed to smaller companies.

The one thing that a startup can't duplicate is company brand and history.  Brand equates to automatic relationships and trust, especially from a business perspective.  There's a certain amount of latitude and respect that you get automatically when people recognize and respect the brand of the company you're working for.  That's been a very interesting thing to observe at Cisco.

There's one use case for this trust that I haven't seen explored much:  Cross-business social analytics.  Daydreaming about this, I can see some very interesting opportunities for a trusted intermediary to become a clearinghouse for metrics and industry insight.  By having access to individual companies' data and being trusted not to share it, competitor data could be aggregated and individual companies could compare their metrics against the industry average, without anyone's data being exposed.  The only thing required is that each of the individual companies trust the clearinghouse with their data.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly useful to see how my company's issue resolution rate compared to my competitors, what my conversion rate is compared to the industry average, etc.  By consolidating this over time you could even look at industry trends against your individual metrics etc.

It would be interesting to see how open companies are to this.  If it was actually successful I can see several interesting offshoots such as the clearinghouse becoming a "credit rating agency" for the industry, providing reports that verify that the company is in fact in the Top 10% for a given metric against the industry.

The one real drawback I can see is companies might become excessively metric-driven.  For example, if software development managers started comparing a BS metric like lines of code to the industry average, that would be an extremely bad thing.

Every once in a while I like to take a step back, survey the landscape, and take stock of the direction technology is moving.  It’s a fun exercise, and the feedback lets me know whether I have my head on straight or not.  So in the tradition of Wired’s Wired/Tired/Expired trends, here are my picks:

Hot Trends

Currently emerging trends that are catching on fast.

#1 - Crowd Sourcing

Crowd sourcing is getting a lot of press lately, primarily thanks to Wikipedia which is the best example and the shining superstar of crowd sourcing applications.  User generated content is huge, and if you can find a way to leverage your user base to create relevant content it’s money in the bank for you.  Other notable examples:  Amazon Mechanical Turk, Google Image Labeler, and Threadless.com.

I should also note that I’m a huge fan of the wisdom of crowds, which is one of the reasons I’m so big on crowd sourcing.  The knowledge of masses of people has proved to be far more accurate than a small group of very smart people, which in my mind is one of the biggest reasons that Wikipedia has been so successful.  Related to crowd sourcing are prediction markets, which are hard to grasp for a lot of people but otherwise intensely interesting technology.

#2 - Mobile Web

The Mobile Web has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to the iPhone.   Ironically, although the iPhone was designed to make the normal everyday Web browsable without any changes, since its release there has been a proliferation of “iPhone compatible” sites which are sites specifically designed to be more readable on smaller screens.  If you don’t have an iPhone you must suffer with one of the old-school mobile Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or HTC browsers, all of which suck pretty badly in this day and age of AJAX.

While the Mobile Web is certainly improving, devices still have some improvements to make, and the networks themselves need to speed up.  Scott Karp has a nice writeup of why the Mobile Web is still maturing on his blog.

#3 - IPTV

I’ve been anticipating the decline of Old Media for a while now.  I think it’s one of the most archaic and painful systems we still have to deal with today, not to mention an insidious way for the people who control it to manipulate public opinion and politics.

Thankfully, IPTV is on the way.  More and more content providers are streaming their content directly from their Web sites, and televisions are progressively gaining the capability to connect directly to the Web thanks to products like Apple TV, the Xbox 360, and my new favorite company Cisco with their acquisition of Scientific Atlantic.  YouTube is creating a global pool of content that anyone can contribute to and consume from.  The Web is already creating waves as it breaks news and provides information ahead of Old Media, this is (thankfully) a serious threat to their business.

Fading Fads

These fads are currently still creating buzz, but my gut says they’re all hot air (l probably just sucked on the flame-mail firehose, oh well…):

#4 - Virtual Worlds

It’s possible I just don’t understand this… but then again neither do a lot of other people.  While virtual worlds like Second Life continue to generate a lot of buzz, the results speak for themselves—and they’re not saying good things.  The businesses are not anywhere near profitable, and the worlds are mostly empty places populated primarily by porn-hounds.

My take is, if I want to play a game I’ll play a game.  If I want to find information, Google and the standard Web work just fine.  I’d rather not go finding and flying to a virtual kiosk somewhere.  I get the impression that this is the virtual reality of the 00’s—namely, a fad.

#5 - Web Desktops/Operating Systems

Web Desktops have been all the rage lately, and these companies have begun labeling themselves Web Operating Systems.  I always dislike it when someone takes a perfectly fine word like “operating system” and dilutes it to the point of uselessness; to me this is exactly what these companies are doing.  Google and Yahoo basically own the virtual desktop space (NetVibes seems to be doing alright as well), and there is no need for more entries in this marketplace, it is already saturated.  They make nice personalized home pages.  Relabeling your product a “Web OS” only serves to kill a perfectly useful word.

#6 - Proprietary API’s

I’m probably stepping into some hot water here, but I hate closed, proprietary API’s.  Anytime a company announces a new API (see SalesForce and, more recently, FaceBook and LinkedIn) they get applauded for being open.  To me this does not feel “open”, it feels more like an attempt to lock people into the system.  It's like buying a phone that only calls the company you bought it from, just doesn't make much sense to me.  If you actually sit down and take a look at these API’s you’ll see that they carefully pick and choose what they open up, and they typically try to keep most of the value locked up in their system.  A truly open API would open up some possibility for interoperability.  Instead of launching proprietary API’s that don’t work together, these companies should form an industry workgroup and hash out something that will work for everyone.  If they don’t, it will EVENTUALLY be their undoing.

Promising Trends Looking for Traction

These trends are extremely promising, just not popular. 

#7 - RSS/ATOM

So, so useful, but outside of the technology elites people just don’t get it.

#8 - Universal Contact Lists

One unified contact list (as opposed to a different contact list for every service you use) is one of the most useful things ever conceived.  Unfortunately, it’s just not here yet, so we’re stuck managing ten different accounts.  Hopefully that will fundamentally change soon, but in the meantime we have products like Plaxo that do a pretty bang-up job of synchronizing your lists.

#9 - The Semantic Web

Ah, the Semantic Web… it’s kind of like Green Energy—you always hear about it, it’s supposed to be a great thing, but you just don’t see it out there.  It also suffers from ambiguity, I take its meaning to be marked-up machine readable content.  I think it’s missing that one killer app that will make it more mainstream, but we will see.

Creeping Onto the Radar—Tomorrow’s Trends

These trends aren’t even really on the radar yet except in theoretical discussions by tech geeks, but I believe they’re the future.

#10 - Message Ambiguity and Convergence

The lines between different types of messages is blurring.  Witness the popularity microblogging (see Twitter and Pwnce), which is essentially just a hybrid text messages/blog post.  A message is a message is a message, and technology is starting to reflect that by allowing you to handle more messages in the same way.  Eventually you will have one universal inbox for voicemail, email, SMS, and instant messages—the iPhone and sites like GrandCentral are hinting towards that future.

#11 - Online Identity Convergence/Consolidation and Protection

Online identities are becoming increasingly important.  What comes up when you Google yourself matters, a lot.  This is sure to become a big, talked-about issue soon, because theoretically your online identity can be stolen.  Parents should be advised to start protecting their kids’ online identities proactively, and monitor what their kids are putting on the Web, because it all goes on your permanent record.

#12 - Personal Servers

No, not a big heavy loud server in everyone’s basement (like the two I’m currently sitting next to), but a virtualized, personally-owned and -controlled online presence—an extension of yourself that can be reached directly over the Net.  Or, as someone smarter than myself recently called it--much more accurately--your online avatar. 

So what do you think?  Agree/disagree/have other picks?