Dave Winer recently wrote:
Twitter is the new OS. For the moment. It’s like the Apple /// in the days before the IBM PC. Remember the Apple ///? (Not many do.)
I think that’s a good insight, and I like the comparison to the early days of the PC (really the pre-PC). But I don’t think Twitter is it.
What I think is coming is going to be more like a jumble of Greasemonkey and Shiftspace. Though I don’t think either of those are “it” — at least, not yet.
Those services still look, to me, like that Altair 8800. Greasemonkey in particular. It’s a platform, or a set of tools, or something that you can use to do stuff, but it really doesn’t do anything on its own. Started and still primarily used by hobbyists, uber-geeks, web-nerds.
Cringely began his “Triumph of the Nerds” mini-history of the PC with an episode called “Impressing Their Friends”, basically arguing the thesis that we owe the phenomenal technology we have today (mid-nineties, when the series aired) all because a group of hardcore nerds spent a lot of time trying to impress their friends.
Compare that to this from this 2005 Wired article on Greasemonkey (probably the only mainstream magazine article about Greasemonkey so far) (emphasis added):
Greasemonkey was originally written by Aaron Boodman, who wrote the program in December 2004 to amuse his friends and found himself pleasantly surprised when it grew into a cult hit.
I think 10 years from now, when people talk about how they are using computing, Greasemonkey is going to be singled out as a sort of turning point, like the Altair 8800. Greasemonkey itself will probably not ever be used by the millions and millions of people who surf the web (neither did the Altair 8800 enter into “mainstream” usage); I imagine it will remain the playground of web-hackers and early adopters.
But I do see a prominent place for something building on what Shiftspace has created; a “layer” over the web. It will be easy to use, easy to install. It will probably be standardized in some way. It will allow people to see layers of annotation, comments, user-created links, and additional content over the entire web.
The owners of any given website will lose control over what their visitors see or do not see; a visitor to your site might choose to view it with only the content and styles you provide. They may choose to see what annotations & comments (if any) a certain group has been making on your page. They may choose to highlight a phrase from your blog post and directly annotate with a long essay on why you’re wrong (or right). They might click on the user name of another annotator and be taken to a page that lists all the recent annotations and interests of that person.
The people on the bleeding edge of what’s new and hip on the web don’t seem to be very excited about the scenario I’ve just described. So far, I’m thinking there are two possible reasons for this:
- I’m wrong. This will never happen, and no one cares. Obviously, I don’t think this is the right reason, but I’ve been wrong before, so I guess we can’t rule it out. Or,
- It’s not the Next Big Thing. It’s the Next.times(n) Big Thing, where n > 1. I don’t think of my self as being especially prescient, so I think if this is the case, n is still probably a pretty low number. 2 or 3 at the most.
I like Shiftspace, but I’m not sure it’s the application of this concept that is going to break through to the mainstream; though I think it could be the application that opens peoples’ eyes to what is possible.
Something like the Apple II did for the personal computer.
