NYC Recap: Techmologny!

GEEKERATI

I've returned from NYC, exhausted and sporting a swollen liver. But I had an amazing week and wasted not a moment of time while I was there, except maybe those moments I was wasted.

The purpose of my visit was to attend the Web 2.0 Expo, sponsored by O'Reilly Media. If you're any kind of technophile, you'll know of O'Reilly's tech training empire.

Strange but benevolent forces were in play for me last week. I lived this weird double life. During the day, I was inundated and surrounded by tech talk, tech speak, tech folk. At night, I attended literary events and lived the life, if for only a few days, of an author in New York. It's a toss-up which life I enjoyed more. I'll write more on the literary side - my drunken Batman routine - in a later post.

In the day, I attended panels on customized reporting in Google Analytics, SEO optimization, augmented reality and burgeoning virtual currency. Panels on distributed cloud computing, Twitter's dev team data management software and practices, panels on marketing B2B and how to get media attention for tech companies. Panels on Xbox Support's adoption of Twitter, philosophical talks about the role of technology in our lives and what the purpose of it is.

Tim O'Reilly's keynote inspired me. It follows in its entirety.



I've come from the conference excited and a little overwhelmed with the possibilities of our future. I've talked smack on Steve Jobs – he IS a tremendous asshole – but with the iPhone, he's opened up new vistas of human behavior. More specifically, by including GPS, a camera, a compass in the iPhone, he's made every owner a sensory node on the global net. The new permutations and implementations of services like foursquare and gowalla alone are staggering.

Node is just nerd pronounced with a NY accent, or so sayeth Steve Weddle.

SUPERTHEORY OF SUPEREVERYTHING

The ways technology affects behavior was the focus of the expo. It wasn't just about technology. The common theme running through my days was human behavior – how will this technology affect human behavior? What impact does this have on how people relate to each other? How will it change the way they live their lives? Does it fulfill their needs?

It was strange how many times in the course of the convention I realized technologists think about the same think writers do, but in different ways. I heard many times at panels, “How can we use this to create a compelling narrative for the end user?” or “All the technology in the world doesn't matter if it doesn't make people's lives better or engage them in some way by creating a compelling experience.”

When I'd hear things like that, I sit there, stunned, considering how similar that advice was to writing advice I've heard. Sometimes I felt like I was coming close to a unified theory of creative endeavor. It almost came into focus. Then I lost it.

GEEKY STUFF ON OUR HORIZON

New tech on our horizon? Flexible screens and subdermal vital statistics. Augmented reality is gonna become ubiquitous. QR and RFID is gonna become more integrated with our everyday lives. Real space MMORPGs are gonna start cropping up on every phone platform, using AR as a driving feature. Some concrete and more immediate things coming in the next year? We're gonna see a new launch of MySpace in hopes of taking on Facebook – Rupert Murdoch ain't giving up that easily on a bad investment. Microsoft is coming out with another phone. This one is pretty slick, actually. Its GUI is almost more intuitive than the iPhone's. I should say equally intuitive. But they're so far behind it's gonna be tough to gain any traction in a space already occupied by the iPhone and Android.

Judging by the number of iPads, iPhones, fancy silver Mac computers, Apple's market share has increased dramatically in the last few years. And it's only gonna grow more unless some other company can offer better UI design (doubtful) coupled with richer application design (likely). Google and HP and Dell will soon be releasing slate platforms and I'm considering the Google version.

Your blessing and curse for the day: May you live in interesting times.