All this week I’m going to be writing about the whole future of the way we use computers, so if you don’t want to know the score, look away now. This is the sort of thing we geeks daydream about when we’ve got an idle moment. You may be more interested in what’s for dinner tonight; I wouldn’t blame you.
While watching a football match on the TV the other day, something happened which made me sit up in a way I haven’t done for about 15 years. That earlier occasion had been in the mid-nineties when, at the end of a TV programme, the closing credits were followed by a web address, where presumably you could get more information. It sounds totally unremarkable now, but at the time it was astonishing. The vast majority of people watching wouldn’t have even known what that “www” thing was. But it was TV acknowledging, and actually using, the web. That was the moment, years before the dot-com boom, when I knew something big was coming.
Fast-forward to 2010 and the football match in question. On the annoying electronic advertisement hoardings by the side of the pitch, the Premier League club (we don’t say the C-word here) was advertising its downloadable “app” for the iPhone. I nearly dropped my Doritos. Once again, it struck me that something major was brewing: the end of the web as we know it. And I’m going to explain why over the next few days.
