We are Twitter, Resistance is Futile!

Posted by Martin Brochhaus | Filed under Thoughts

On last Wednesday evening I was looking forward to attend the PyCologne Python user group meeting for the first time together with a colleague. “Twitter with Python” was announced as one of the topics which sounded pretty interesting to me. Unfortunately the meeting was canceled due to not enough attendees. Guess how we came to know the bad news? Right! The information hit us through the big hive mind called Twitter.

That moment I was asking myself where Twitter might lead humanity. The core service is so unbelievably simple that even my grandmother would be able to use it. Therefore it’s very likely that the already very huge user base will grow much much bigger anytime soon. The API seems to be breeze as well since no week goes by without a new Twitter client / mashup / service. Currently one of the most interesting Twitter services is Twitpic, letting you easily link to pictures in your messages. Imagine the next step: Yesterday we published our thoughts. Today we paste what we see. Tomorrow we might add what we hear – and end up tweeting live video streams using our smartphones and digital cameras. In fact, this already happens.

As technology evolves (gets smaller) I guess the day will come where everyone owns high-tech sunglasses with informative HUDs, equipped with ultra-small cameras broadcasting everything everyone sees into the internet. If you take a crowded place somewhere in New York for instance you would get graphical material from hundreds of persons and from hundreds of perspectives. Advanced grid computing software should be capable of merging all those video-information into ONE big 3D-szene. Let’s call this “virtual reality”. In fact, this already happens as well for quite some time. At least with pictures. Using this technique for videos shouldn’t be too difficult.

What would this mean? I could Google for “Where is my mom?” and the system would lookup my mom from my Twitter contacts, compare her face to all faces currently being “live” in the virtual reality. A world map would appear on my HUD and show me all locations where persons with matching faces have been localized. Now I could chose a particular location and fly around virtually at that place since it is 3D. If all that data would be archived we could even define place and time and watch happenings around the world in the past. As often as we like. We could even rewind.

I just thought I’d write this down so I can say “I knew it!” when this vision comes true in 30 years…