Questions
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Nick Galvin, a Features Writer with the Sydney Morning Herald, asking if I’d be interested in answering some quick questions about what’s hot on the web for a feature in their weekly technology supplement for the “interested home user”, Icon. I jumped at the chance and thanks must go to John Allsopp recommending me.
The piece was published today and I finally got see who the other people were. I put a scan on my Flickrstream so you can read the full text at either Large or Original (bloody large). Huge thanks must go to the legendary Seng Mah for yet again allowing me to use his photo of me from last August as my publicly respectable face.
Update: Turns out the article did get published online, so it’s much easier to read there.

Dopple Your Fun: Lachlan Hardy
Answers
What I found most interesting is comparing my answers with those of Cheryl , Virginia , Tim and John. The differences are more telling than the similarities, I think. Cheryl’s answers are consumer-focused, John talks about the big picture and Tim can’t help but dish on what’s important to developers. Of the four, Virginia’s are probably closest to mine in ideas, although hers are expressed far more beautifully. (And she led me to a gorgeous new theme for my tumblelog!)
I copped a bit of a ribbing at work about the reference in the standfirst to ‘internet gurus’. Fair enough. I find it amusing too. Thing is, though, that I know some other internet gurus.
Anybody willing to spend any time at all reading my infrequent posts is automatically qualified as pretty damn interested in the internet (or related to me. Hi, Mum!). So I want to know what you would have answered. What are your responses to the three questions? You don’t have to stick to 180 words like we did!
- What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
- What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
- What will be the Next Big Thing?
Add answers or links to answers below.
Comments
There are 52 comments on this post.
OK, redoing question three for my first post. I’ve got a tie for question number 3.
Everyblock.com is awesome.
I was pretty darn rapt when I found Suburb View and Old Listings, both great examples of useful mashups rather than mashups for the sake of it.
Another thing that really excited me online was pulling in Tumblr feeds to Jaiku. Sounds simple enough but it enabled individual research at the same time as community driven discussion in a learning environment.
Other than that, I haven’t come across anything super exciting for a while.
Hmm…
Congratulations on your guru status, mate! It’s a good piece, and for what it’s worth, here’s my 2 pence:
Congratulations on your guru status, mate! It’s a good piece, and for what it’s worth, here’s my 2 pence:
laconi.ca, freebase parallax and oauth are all worth some attention. N810 is a nice gadget.
The fewer things I need to carry in my pockets, the better - the solution was never a man-bag or a belt clip, it was less stuff that does more. My iPhone is a better PDA than a dedicated PDA and yet also is so good at being my mobile browser, pocket gaming platform, photo album and portable TV/movie/music player as well that I’d have bought one for those reasons even if it weren’t a PDA, much less a phone. It’s so good because it hides complexity from the consumer and integrates so tightly with Macs and Apple TV.
For example: if I’m not able to finish watching something on my AppleTV, when I watch it later on my iPhone (assuming it’s synced) it picks up from the point I stopped watching on the Apple TV. Glad I wasn’t on the team that had to make that work, but I love using a device that does such magical stuff with so little fanfare.
The Next Big Thing will Not Be What I Predict It To Be. Been around long enough to have the conclusive proof. But now I’m old enough to be allowed to not understand Kids These Days it doesn’t hurt so much so I’ll have one more stab at it: a NBT might be third-party APIs - APIs that aren’t associated with one product or company, but useful enough to enough products that they are conceived, designed, built and maintained either by an open community or by a company so light and fast that just providing a super useful API is a feasible business model. APIs are pure network effect.
…either that, or the Next Big Thing will be the decreasing age at which you stop understanding Kids These Days and the average age of Kids. Pretty soon, 16 year olds will be complaining about Kids These Days. Twelve year olds will be creating the most exciting media, fashion, architecture and social changes.
Generations will become so narrow that demographers will have to demarcate them by month of birth.
“What you have to understand,” they’ll tell the 15 year old leaders of industry, “is that the generation of March, 2005 is radically different to the generation of April, 2005. You simply can’t expect the user-generated viral marketing mashups created by generation of April, 2005 to work on them.”
Meanwhile, 17 year olds will be unable to get any cash out, reply to a message or reset a clock without help.
…argh, while making the previous entry I migrated into the generation that is young enough to remember what Markdown syntax is, but too old to remember how to use it without rtfm. All that’s left for me now is to campaign for euthanasia law reform.
My response is on my blog. Great cue, awesome questions, and great article!
I’m in awe of all these amazing responses! Thank you.
In particular, I love that with so many people responding, the differences are still so great. There are stalwarts like Twitter and location-based services, but the sheer range of things of interest to all of you who have chosen to comment is exciting in itself!
I especially love that Charles was unable to limit himself to his comment above, but had to unleash a blog post as well. Nice work, Charles!
My main man Stateside , Alex Hillman, also busted out a fantastic blog post, go read it.
Richard MacManus loved your responses so much that he’s posted his own on ReadWriteWeb, where he’s already received 28 more top 3 app lists (at time of writing).
I’m guessing that Daniel Spronk, who posted the first comment and jokingly referred his own incredible contacts syncing service Soocial as the next big thing, will be gratified to see just how many of you agree with him. For those who’ve not used it, get into the beta ASAP. It’s fantastic.
I don’t know how else to address this awesome content, except to say keep them coming! I’ll be looking up apps and services for weeks at this rate. And re-assessing things I’ve looked previously as dismissed as immature or uninteresting.
Thanks so much for this inspiring catalogue of webby goodness to explore!
Certainly a good list of responses so far… but I might add:
I’ll stick with the safe answer and go with my “breakthru internet device” – aka my iPhone. ;)
I love iPhone-friendly web apps (Brightkite is among the best). It gives me a sense for where the web is going on mobile devices (thanks to mobile Safari) and also where it needs to go and needs to improve (interactivity, preventing crashes, authorization, account management, identity, etc).
There are few “next big things” left, unless you radically shrink your conception of “big”. Many popular things are now niche-popular, and that’s fine. The Dark Knight is a rare exception, I think.
That said, I do think location is going to take off in a major way – and will become yet another thing developers can “take for granted”. And that’s big.
Another “widespread” trend I see coming is the need to be more multi- and inter-disciplinary as designers or technology. As Ethan Kaplan pointed out, effective web design should no longer be constrained to just IE and Firefox in a desktop environment. That means we have to think more clearly about what our applications do, why they do each thing, and how each “feature” we add, offers value in different settings or context.
Sites and apps that don’t adapt to that reality are going to suffer some severe custom service issues.
So says I.
Just thought of something else for #1. Twine.com, it’s in Beta at the moment but looks very promising. Not sure if anyone mentioned it already. And after reading everyone’s comments made me think more about #3 and besides the web becoming more intelligent and open I think we’ll see/ are seeing a move to total online database sharing across different programs/apps, so there will be a total focus on how users retrieve information as there is currently an overload of data out there.
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