I often listen to what people like Tim O'Reilly (computer manual publisher/icon) and Sir Tim  Berners-Lee (father of the World Wide Web) have to say about the future of computing.  Last night, I watched a recent interview with Tim O'Reilly speak about the continued advancement of the Web.  Back in 2004, Tim O'Reilly and two of his colleagues coined the phrase Web 2.0. Where are we going and what might we expect from the future of the web.  Both O'Reilly and Berners-Lee expect a heavy advancement in the semantic web. But before explaining more on the semantic web and its impact, look at some subtle changes to current computing.  Instead of just relying on a keyboard and mouse to input text, we are now beginning to see other tools used, not by geeks, but everyday consusmers.  The use of a GPS and an accelerometer, as it is built into the iPhone, for example, allows the device to be used in manners other than just typing.  The new Google App for the iPhone allows a user to get information, such as movie times, just by talking into the phone.  The GPS allows for the search to be local to your location, while the accellerometer intuitively understands you are placing the phone to your ear to begin talking.  This is a small example of the beginning of new human/computer interactions.

O'Reilly makes reference to the user interface (UI) of the near future.  Imagine your glasses acting as your UI, offering updated information, such as biography information on that person across the room.  What?  Impossible?  Probably not.  There are rudimentary glasses on the market right now that act as your monitor.  The current version of iPhoto has facial recognition built in.  Add to this a beefed up wireless internet connection, combined with your Outlook database on steroids.  Instead of having 5000 people in your database, you might subscribe to an enhanced Facebook or LinkedIn that has facial recognition and bios on millions of people.  Now, as you walk down the street and look up at an interesting building, the building's tenant list pops up on your UI.  Community tagging protocols alllow for immediate general information on the public space.  Across the street is the grocery store. Walk in and start checking health guide information on that piece of produce as you pick it up.  Your glasses have a scanner on them, picking up information such as harvest date, location and use/non-use of pesticides in the production of the crop.

Although these are just my examples of potential future computing, they are based on current technology that will continue to evolve as the semantic web (and the social semantic web) come to fruition.  There are many skeptics of the semantic web, based on worries of privacy and censorship, as well as whether it will actually happen.  In my optimistic mindset, I believe there is enough potential good from a semantic web to march forward.  What is the semantic web?  My definition is a modification of the one found in Wikipedia.  Semantic web is the combined evolution of information services for deeper interaction of people and machines to use web content in a more precise manner.  While semantic web enables integration of business processing with precise automatic logic, the social semantic web is more about the deeper evolution of people using computers.

Ten years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee stated his vision for the future of the Web.  "I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

My imagination continues to run.  I see the future of public and private clouds that offer various services that are immediately available. All you need to do is ask.  My voice activated microphone, which is built into my sunglasses, picks up my request to scan the grocery aisles.  Since my diet is recorded by my personal agent (semantic web), I am reminded that it is time to eat some more fiber.  My agent remembers the ingredients for that special cauliflower recipe and begins to point out items that I need to purchase for the meal.  I did not have to sit in front of a computer to get this information. Instead, it is with me, on my mobile computing device and agent.

However, the most important future for computing still revolves around how I keep track of my sunglasses.  I keep on losing them.  I can't wait to hear what O'Reilly or Berners-Lee does for keeping track of their glasses.

Scott Charter

These were the amazing words I heard today from Larry Halff, founder of Ma.golia.com. I was submitting a blog article today and decided to check out the little link sharing icons our website puts below each article to submit it to link sharing sites. I tried to go to ma.gnolia.com, one of my favorites. To my surprise, it was gone, though their cute flower logo was still visible. Instead there was a web site with a painful story of file loss and implosion of their site, with a very interesting video from the founder of ma.gnolia.com listing his mistakes and learnings.

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

In short, their MySQL database got its files corrupted. Their half-terabyte database was backed up, but the corruption was backed up as well. Eventually, the data became unreadable, and ma.gnolia.com came to and end.

The founder, Larry Halff, showed tremendous and admirable humility in listing his mistakes, but he also told a cautionary tale that we here at ENKI both lived ourselves at startups as well as observed with some of our customers prior to their joining us:

1. MySQL is a dangerously inadequate database for production work. Sure, YouTube uses it, and so do hundreds of thousands of LAMP sites. But it's very susceptible to corruption, and its administration facilities are inadequate to prevent it. In the hands of inexperienced or amateur DBAs, it is ripe for disaster, yet it is presented as an easy entry-level database. We've had customers suffer long downtimes due to corruption from crashes in MySQL. We also have customers with nearly insoluble performance problems. And, even though our cloud computing environment restarts software on failed servers automatically, MySQL does not always successfully survive a restart, or if it does, it requires extensive database table repair (especially with myISAM tables). If uptime is important, we feel you should look elsewhere, though it can be made to work with sufficient expertise.

2. Startups shouldn't do their own IT. I bring this up often because of my own experiences as a software person trying to do my own IT, or watching the stream of missteps in the early years of startups I've worked at including NetSuite. In the video, Larry says, " The real lesson Learned is if you’re a startup, don’t do your own IT at all.” I'm hoping it's a lot more convincing when it doesn't come from my mouth, now that I've started a company to address this need.