“Web Squared articulates a broader fusion between the world-at-large, the Web, and the people connected to it. It’s a more extreme view of Web 2.0 while at the same time hinting that while social computing has been a major transformative force recently in the consumer world and beyond, the relentless growth of devices, network connectivity, and sensors into our lives across our homes, workplaces, and external environment is casting an growing “information shadow” that is increasingly hard to ignore.”
Google’s Holodeck is a glimpse of what this virtual interaction may feel like. So, picture this... The holidays are upon you and you haven’t done any gift shopping yet. It’s snowy and cold outside. Yuck. You sit down in your living room at your panoramic computer workstation and do a “fly by” over your city as you consider the various shops below. “Hmmm... There’s Nordstrom, there’s Target, there’s Outback Steak House...”, etc. You choose Nordstrom. As you virtually walk through the store (wearing digital gloves), and reach out with your hands, you’re actually able to pick things up off the shelf, rotate them and read the labels. Holding a bottle of bath beads, you think, “Yes, Sally would love this,” as you place it in your virtual shopping cart. You stroll over to the men’s clothing, thumb through the shirts thinking about a gift for Fred. Picking one up, you think, “I wonder if Fred would like this one?” A little unsure, you ping five of Fred’s friends on Facebook and show them the shirt in real time on their mobile devices. The conclusion? He’ll love it. After your gift shopping is done, you decide to stop by the grocery store to pick up a few items. Again, a fly by over your city, a swoop down to enter Albersons, a virtual walk through the aisles, and the grocery store’s courier service has your order in their delivery truck and on its way to your home before you know it.
O’Reilly and Battelle write, in an article entitled
“Web Squared and the Internet of Things” that the Internet is
“...no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world—everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow,’ an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.” The implications and impact on the way in which we live is mind boggling.
“A movement is underway to add any imaginable physical object into the Internet of Things. In Japan, for example, many cows have IP addresses embedded onto RFID chips implanted into their skin, enabling farmers to track each animal through the entire production and distribution process. In the words of journalist Sean Dodson, we are facing a future ‘where pretty much everything is online,’ or according to O’Reilly and Battelle, ‘the web is now the world’.”
Just warning you up front... The video below is REALLY long. Almost an hour. But if you’re feeling über-geeky, it’s cool stuff.
