When I was 8, I got a 14.4 modem and an AOL dialup subscription for my birthday. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I quickly started exploring all that AOL had to offer. Soon, I started to wonder how web pages actually got on the internet, so I found AOL Personal Publisher and started messing around.

In most cases, 8 year olds don’t have too much to contribute to the world, and I was no exception. I just wanted to create a web page for something, so I settled on one thing that was well known to me and friends — video games. I created AJ’s Code Page (specializing in infinite lives, double damage, god mode, and the like) hosted on the now-defunct members.aol.com, and started trying to figure out how to get users.

It was near the beginning of the web (1993), and nobody really knew what was going on, so it was an amazing learning experience. I had never heard of Photoshop at that point, much less have any experience with it, so I found some graphic designer on a forum that made a [pretty cool] banner logo featuring a Playstation logo on the left, the words “AJ’s Code Page” in the middle, and the Nintendo 64 logo on the right. I scoured the web for links to the best code pages, and found, among others, hyper@ctive (also defunct), which had a seemingly endless supply of codes for nearly any game.

The AJ's Code Page Banner

I kept trying new ways to get traffic, and signed up for some banner exchange programs which were an early form of banner advertising where people in a network would agree to show your banner (rotated among others in the network) in exchange for you showing their banner on your site. The goal was more to get traffic than to actually make any money, although I’m sure that some people figured out ways to profit from it. To a third grader, money isn’t the first thought when you’re just trying to get people to look at a site you’ve thrown up on the net.

I plugged along, and for months the counter at the bottom of my page registered barely any page views. I continually submitted my page to every search engine I could find, yet nothing really boosted my audience. I wasn’t discouraged — after all, my goal was first to see if I could make a cool page, and second to actually get visitors to that page. However, all of the sudden, one week something just “clicked”, and the counter had over 2000 hits! The next day, another 500! A few weeks later, I was at 8000 hits, and I felt like I was on top of the video game code world!

Who cares? I had all but forgotten about “AJ’s Code Page” and the beginnings of my foray into creating a web community until several weeks ago. I was laid off from my job in Wall Street, and I wanted to set up a web site for people that were in the same position and just wanted a place to go and chat, and network informally with others. Not a job site, but a place where you could feel comfortable asking where to find a cheap drink or talking about interesting places you’ve traveled during your time between jobs. I took a quick look around the net, and soon The Free Agents was born.

It turns out that the biggest obstacle you have to overcome when beginning an undertaking like this is the self doubt that inevitable springs into your mind. Could I get any users? Would anyone care about the site? Why would someone visit my site when they could just as easily spend their time on Facebook?

The doubt almost doomed my project before I had put a single page up. But strangely, what motivated me was not anything I learned in college, or any encouragement from others. The final push that I needed was simply thinking back and remember that, 15 years ago, I set up a web page that people actually visited. If I could do it then, why not give it another shot now?

The whole idea here, and the title of this post, is the power of ignorance. Eight year olds don’t generally know that something is hard, or that they are almost definitely going to fail. They just go for it — if for no other reason, because they are ignorant of the possibility, or likelihood, of failure. Is AJ’s Code Page still around today? Nope. But that endeavor was enough to motivate me on another project, and convince me that failure isn’t a bad outcome. Will The Free Agents be a roaring success? I hope so, but probabilistically, no. However, I know that if it fails, one day I might look back and say, “I created this social network — its gone now, but it succeeded in convincing me that [whatever] is possible”. And that knowledge may very well eventually lead to something that is a roaring success.

The next decade will be about deconvergence. Perhaps you still have a PC in your den that can browse the web, play music, watch videos that you downloaded off of iTunes and myriad other PCish activities. However, that device will be far less important than it is now, or than it has been in the last 10 years. The idea of using your main PC for everything will fade as smaller, more specialized devices take over and cannibalize the attention that this big, expensive box receives.

Since trading my Treo in for an iPhone, my use of my laptop has greatly diminished. Since getting my laptop, my use of my desktop has greatly diminished. The idea here is that, like just about anyone, my main use for a computer is browsing the web and reading emails. When I got my laptop, no longer was it necessary to be chained to a seat in my room in order to read my websites. It was replaced by sitting on the couch in my living room, where I was able to browse the web without being secluded in a den. Email was similar — the iPhone handles Gmail admirably, so in the same vein, no longer did I have to be chained to a laptop [or desktop] to check my messages — instead, I just clicked on the mail icon on my phone, and there they were.

The exciting thing next on the horizon is small devices that don’t do it all, but do one thing really well, and do it in the most ideal location. I can easily imagine a kitchen device that does little more than email, recipe database, and a basic web browser. Want to write a paper? Too bad, can’t do it here. Want to play a video game? Nope. However, what you do want is basically a kiosk that makes it dead-simple to look up a recipe or follow up on an email with grandma, and this machine does it perfectly. Of course, the price point is important too — however, since the hardware requirements will be extremely modest since we won’t be storing large files or running lots of apps, we can get away with very basic hardware. Eventually, things like these will sell in the $100-150 range, and thats where we get critical mass. Devices like this do exist (the 3M Audrey was perhaps the first, and others have come and gone), but haven’t caught on, probably due to a high price point, poor or nonexistent marketing, and overly complicated or overly simplistic feature sets.

Similar equipment will come for the home stereo and theatre. AppleTV, which has [regrettably] gone largely unnoticed, is a very good first effort at this. Plug the $300 device into your home theater, and you can buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes store and easily watch them on the big screen. Pictures and music stream from your base computer as well. The next step improvement on this is the Roku Netflix Player, which streams 15,000 titles from Netflix into your home. It costs $100, which is barely more than a decent DVD player.

Why haven’t these devices fully caught on yet? For one, people just aren’t really used to getting their television content from a computer. Its still easier to tune into ABC at 7:00 on a Monday night to watch a TV show. Music has all but entirely transitioned to the web and to iTunes (and its better competitor, Amazon Music Store), thanks largely to Apple and the iPod. TV won’t be far behind, but will certainly take a bit more to get there.

Three things stand in the way: the first is simply society — people have to get used to getting off their main computer and allowing satellite devices to take the place for some activities. At this point, a lot of people simply aren’t thinking about how they could link up their computer to their home system and achieve a sort of media nirvana that doesn’t exist right now. DVDs are on their way out, and even BlueRay won’t be the next thing — forget physical disks, its all coming into your house through your internet connection. But it will take some time for basic home users to associate computing and home entertainment, and for the time being, its the job of the early-adopters to spread the word about this killer union.

Second is the price point. Many of the home devices try to be too much, or end up using hardware that is overkill for the most basic purposes that they will be used for. Others just haven’t hit the sweet spot where the price of the hardware and the market-clearing price of the unit have come into alignment. It will, though, and I think this zone, if not upon us, is closer than we think.

Finally, there are still technical barriers. Killer embedded systems will never run Windows or Mac OSX. These operating systems are designed for hub PCs, not for tiny devices running on a basic microchip. A fledgling startup, the kind of company that could likely hit this idea on the head, can’t easily strip down Windows to the point where it runs efficiently on the most basic of systems. Linux is perfectly suited for this, since you can take out all of the excess and leave just the basics, which I see as a kernel, some display drivers, perhaps some sound drivers, some networking, and a few services on top of that to handle communications with other computers in the home. Perhaps a generic server can power your kitchen device, your AV device and your bedroom web-browsing device. DRM is poison to the process, so hopefully the nascent push out of DRM will continue and spread to video content as well as audio content.

My vision of the future? Technology won’t be something you sit down at a desk to access — instead, it will be something that surrounds you and assists everywhere you go. The web isn’t something you open a browser to get on, but rather, the backbone for a dozen of your daily activities, without you even realizing it.

Technorati Profile