This video of a House that Tweets (by this dude) has been doing the rounds for a wee while now and it brings together a couple of things we’ve been thinking about.

Firstly, the world of the physical internet is coming. Quickly. Intelligent objects, pervasive computing, the web of things, whatever you want to call it, it’s on its way. I’m not going to go on about it because others have talked about it at length better than I could. I’ve always quite liked the term Web Wide World to describe it. Maybe I’m just a sucker for iliteration and clever puns.

Secondly, it’s currently a bit rubbish. I’m not sure about you but I don’t really need to get an sms to tell me that a mouse trap just went off. I figure the rotting corpse on my floor is a good enough indicator.

Thirdly, it’s going to get good very soon. An alert that tells you whether a window has been opened, well that’s not so useful if it was you who just opened the bloody thing, but pretty cool if it could be created as a community-wide mobile application and suddenly Neighbourhood Watch is not about soggy, faded boards tied to lampposts, but tangible, useful, clever services that people can use to help each other in easy, remarkable ways.

Fourth, we all need to be a bit more patient. I’ve been hanging around a few conferences recently, and after the usual morning excitement, there is always the afternoon lull when people start looking around, the fidgeting begins, they get bored listening to more people who they eminently agree with, and generally start getting hacked off that there’s a lot of talk and not much action. The echo chamber syndrome.

The thing is I have a lot of sympathy for this frustration. It’s normally me that is looking to the exit to find other folk hanging around in corridors. But then I have to catch myself and think, things are moving quickly, very quickly, Quicker Than At Any Other Time In History, the headlines keeps telling us.  It just doesn’t feel like that when you’re in the eye of the storm I suppose. Only when you look back does it sink in how far we’ve come. To think it was only about 10 years ago Google and Wikipedia started (and Yahoo bought GeoCities for $4.6bn. Oops), and five years since YouTube was set up and video sharing was born. Hell, it was only about twenty years ago that we were all using 16bit computers (from my yoof via internet relics).

This clever man, who is almost certainly quoting another clever man, calls it Macro-Myopia, which

is the tendency to overestimate the short term impact of a new product or technology, and underestimate its long term implications

The truth is we’re just at the beginning of things. This is probably something you’re hear me say again and again, ad nauseum, if we met. Most of the stuff we’re doing right now, including our own work here at Sidekick are just prototypes. They’re precursors. They’re trail-blazers. They’re failed experiments that lead us to the real thing. The valuable thing. The useful thing. And when we find it, we’re all be surprised how quickly we got here.

Tags: internet of things, patience, prototype