It's your sneakers talking. And they'd better be Polite, Pertinent and Pretty

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Web pages turned into a web of data and the future illustrated in the movie Minority Report is nearly there. This is an annotated slideshow of a presentation that Matt Jones (Dopplr.com) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse) gave back in April at the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco (watch fullscreen). It’s quite long and in the end more and more interesting only to user interface designers, but the first 35 slides (yeah I know) cover topics like ubiquitious computing and what Wired founder Kevin Kelly called “personal informatics” (think Minority Report) with many excellent examples that are not science-fiction but available today “and for less than 30 US$”. Personally I can’t wait until my adidas sneakers finally start talking to all the homeless Volkswagens, probably arguing about who is supposed to be taking me home (after checking with my bathroom scale to see how I’m doing on the health front…). Well and if Matt and Tom have their say, our devices will be polite (respecting our prefs, privacy and being transparent), pertinent (telling us about our empty fridge while standing in front of an open supermarket) and pretty: why shouldn’t interfaces to the networked devices and web services of our future not be as beautiful as they can be? I just hope my iPhone earring will be blogging by itself by then, knowing what I’d want to share from talking to my neuroimplant in the amygdalae.