3 posts tagged “email”
Happy birthday to the World Wide Web (WWW)! Todays marks a twenty year milestone for the Internet.
The Web has come a long way since its creation and inception by Tim Berners-Lee, British computer software guru and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) twenty years ago. [Read more here].
The Internet was originally developed to facilitate a more passive type of information sharing between thousands of scientistics around the world - sharing their research and key findings and enabling others to view and comment, on a basic platform, despite geographical borders that separated them.
Today, the Internet is a pervasive and essential part of everyday life. It is no longer just a passive tool for basic computing tasks that we engage in for work and personal use such as email, web surfing and research and is now an all-immersive and interactive version 2.0 and 3.0 of the Internet we once knew.
We have since seen the emergence of a collaborative and interactive Internet with the rise of Web 2.0 tools and social media such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, blogs and micro-blogging tools. This is changing the very nature of the Web.
Happy birthday WWW and I look forward to seeing what you look like in another 20 years. If anyone has an future vision they would like to share, please feel free.
A really interesting IDC study, titled "The Hyperconnected: Here They Come" was released this month which talks about the exploding "culture of connectivity" and the implications that hyper-connectivity has on the enterprise and business practices.
Whilst on a fact finding mission, another interesting point that I came across is that the global mobile workforce continues to grow unabated - IDC expects the global mobile worker population to increase from 758.6 million in 2006 to more than 1 billion in 2011, representing just over 30 percent of the worldwide workforce. [see more details here]
The thing that really struck a chord with me is that we are becoming a generation addicted to connectivity. We are seeing our younger colleagues enter the workforce as 'digital natives' (an idea widely discussed by Peter Sheahan) - they only understand communication via IM, email, text messaging, social networking and so forth. This is the 'conventional' that they seek and the 'unconventional' that the rest of us are all so keen to adopt. Today, we are spending more time connected and switched on in both our personal and work lives - so much so that we are now seeing a blurring between the two.
More and more people are starting to leverage Web 2.0 tools in business (a term coined Enterprise 2.0) such as shared wikis, IM and social networks in order to better facilitate information sharing and collaboration between workers and provide a competitive edge to those businesses that embrace it.
I think we will see Enterprise 2.0 increasingly extend beyond the office as wireless technologies such as in-built 3G, WiFi and WiMAX become faster and more efficient for business users to access personal internet on-the-go, and as mobile devices become sleeker and lighter for users to carry with them.
The IDC study predicts that "hyperconnected business users will likely rise to 40 percent in five years". Another five years down the track, I am sure we will see a substantial increase on this figure. Application and web developers, mobile device/ notebook manufacturers and telecommunications providers will need to cater towards making this hyper-connected experience for users a more seamless one.
Watch this space!
As I was checking over my Google Reader account, I came across one of the funniest videos I have seen in ages, on TechCrunch. The video is titled 'What a comment stream would look like in real life'. The video highlights what a comment stream would look like if we transformed it into a real life scenario - in this instance, it shows the comment stream at a work meeting.
It really conveys how differently we communicate with one another in the online world compared with how we speak with one another in real life circumstances, such as at work. For some reason, these comment streams are quite appropriate when posted online, they get a point across quickly - similar to how you would get your message across using Web 2.0 service Twitter, but it definitely does not have any place in real life conversations.
The people in the meeting come across looking like complete tools, although they rated highly on entertainment value! It just really conveys an interesting point - it raises many issues in my mind. Are we losing our ability to communicate properly with other people due to the rise of emerging technologies? Think about SMS messages, IM and email - do you abbreviate your words and sentences? Do they lk sumthn alng da lines of ths? Do you use words that you don't know the origin of such as 'lol', 'lmao', 'rotfl', 'ttyl', 'pwnd' etc...? Food for thought!!
Take a look at the video below:
