If the World Wide Web was invented in 1980

Have you ever wondered where we would be if the world wide web had been invented in 1980? I know that we’ll likely have a clear idea in another ten years or so but I got to thinking about what Twitter and Facebook really mean to us won’t really be clear for another ten years - in societal terms I truly believe that what we’ve seen in Iran with the rapid adoption of Twitter as a social tool for dissent comes to pass more broadly throughout the world. If the neww reporting and communications business is truly going through dramatic change to incorporate a very different business model (which it is) and Twitter and new online collaboration tools become the norm then the world as we know it today will be dramatically different in 2020. While a world like that portrayed in Minority Report won’t likely come to pass there will certainly be some elements very familiar: interactive advertising, video cameras streaming live from every street corner, personal preferences integrated into our daily interactions -- much of which we can already experience today.

Will this world be better? Worse? I believe that the consensus has to be that it will be a very different world. A world where there are fewer secrets and one in which our children expect less privacy, modesty along with increasing amounts of technological integration. Why would they expect to interact with their video games with a Wii-like wand and then interact with there computers with a keyboard. As a matter of fact there likely will be fewer computers and more special purpose devices with deeper and richer capabilities. Think of your cell phone as a communications tools that can interact with a different type of typewriter access files universally (in the cloud). It may be a world where the idea of a computer will make future generations laugh... you mean you actually carried that thing around?!

While we contemplate what kind of world we’re building here in Silicon Valley you may wonder what provoked this outburst in the first place? (Have you noticed that the day-to-day content of this blog has been driven by the news?) I ran across this wonderful graphic on the web:

What would Apple’s website have looked like in 1983 with Lisa launch?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davelawrence8/3663647101/sizes/o/

I love this kind of creativity. Heck, look what it provoked in me...