When I was a kid I was on the razor edge of technology. I cradled my commodore 64 like a Shadowrun Cyberdeck and bled BASIC. As I grew older the tech curve shortened into a wheel and rolled away from me so fast that I can barely see it on the horizon. Last year I picked up my first iphone, a 4s that was utterly outdated even as I was signing the receipt. Still, the device supports many of the newfangled applications all the kids are using these days. Of course, I’m not a kid anymore, so I’m lucky if I’ve even heard of them let alone used them.
Today being a cool kid means having access to a secret world of technology that us grown-ups wouldn’t even imagine. When we finally do imagine and, have mercy, discover the tech, the kids abandon it like Titanic rats. Twitter, Facebook, Google, all are the hot stuff in the media and dead space in the mind of the digital pioneers. Heck, even snapchat is reaching the end of its quiet lifespan, having recently (and regrettably) turned down a 3 Billion dollar buy out bid from Facebook. I’m left to wonder what is next?
A friend just turned me on to Glide, a video text service–one that operates outside of the facetime standard. It leads me to believe that there are other things out there of this sort, and, not for the first time, how deep the rabbit hole goes. For a time hackers made their name known by breaking high security sites. These days coders are running the same hustle–coding alternative social media connectors in an effort to be noticed and dip into the enormous wealth and buying capital of the kids of the world. The next wave of social media applications will be smarter, faster, and totally alien to former Commodore hacks like myself. Given the surprising financial accessibility of the upcoming Google glass, it is likely these future apps will also be incredibly visual.
Augmented Reality, here we come.