Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

The whole SNS/social aspects of the web have made social computing, imo, somewhat into a trivial thing.  While social computing has done a great deal to improve the web (wikipedia, friends, openness, APIs, recommendations, etc.) , I think it's been overdone to the point where everyone is jumping on board because of the simplicity and the little formula that goes:

More returning users * (mistaken ad clicks + page impressions) = jumbo profit

This formula will run its limits eventually and companies like Google will get tremendously hurt if they continue to depend upon it as the ultimate source of income.  And I think companies outside of the smallest ad driven sites that manage to have low operating cost and high traffic should watch out in depending upon this formula as their only source of revenue.

I've been a firm believer in hard numbers, a hard product that gives you some kind of money back because people are willing to purchase it.  Information, for all intents and purposes, is practically free, driven by the economies of the social web formula of accounting.  Therefore, information should be the only source of development for the web for companies wishing to make a profit and looking for new ideas.

A more difficult path that should be explored is appliances.  We've started already with the easy things like TV and media players.  However, I haven't seen enough innovation things like home appliances where a refrigerator is the same kind of refrigerator you could buy 10 years ago.

I mentioned before about these ideas of mine like the automated microwave, the intelligent vacuum, the apartment profile, and home security, etc.  You can look up a previous blog to see it.  But the main concept is that we need more emphasis on these areas.  You have Apple's concept of "Apple Life" or Sony's "Sony Life".  But they almost solely revolve around computing and home entertainment.  In my viewpoint, the entertainment is the frosting on the cake and we need to eat our salad and veggies before we get to the good stuff.

So the salad and veggies are our chores we need to accomplish at home.  But as a lazy person, I don't want to handle them.  I'd prefer to spend more time on the entertainment section.  I mean, it's a royal pain in the butt putting my clothes in the basket.  You should see all the clothes lying on my floor!  Or to clean my toilet, it's just a bitch having to buy the little toilet brush and scrub, etc.  And doing the dishes....I don't mind doing the dishes but I tend to let them sit in the sink for almost a week (because I mostly cook on the weekends).  The worst part is that I never can invite friends over because my place is a mess.  I'm too tired, lazy and energiless to to handle sweeping shit up. 

My friends suggested a maid but it's too costly.  And you'd have to get these recurring cost.  Not to mention there's always the possibility of some violation of privacy or theft.

It's really ironic for myself too.  When you see my computer, everything is organized extremely well.  I have all these filters for my email, my folders are nice clean, I have methods for handling back ups.  So my virtual life is handled extremely well.

My personal life....well, I'm hoping if I ever get a wife that she's really compassionate :)

More than likely, I'd have to do these corrections myself.  But imagine being able to have something like a virtual cleaner or service that can manage your home life from your desktop at work.  Click, your floor is clean!  Click, your bed is made!

I don't think the solution is a robot honestly.  These tasks are too complicated at the moment for AI and are better suited to specialized applications and devices.  But I do think that we need to think more about the marriage between our home life and our virtual life through the internet, embedded systems, and devices that can handle this.