You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
---Steve Jobs, You've got to find what you love
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
---Marshall McLuhan
We learned how to use email instantly
Ray Tomlinson will be remembered by his invention of email in 1971. @ became one of the most well known special characters used everyday. Although email at first imitated the paper mails, it has been eliminating paper mails, and furthermore changed the way of human communication. Still, in 1994, about 20 years after the invention of email, I knew nothing about email and did not know how to send an email when going to a university of about 50 thousand students. As I knew, at that time, there were only two computers that can be used to send emails on the campus. About one year after CERNET became available on campus, every students I met in computer classrooms had at least two email addresses. Everyone knew how to use email in a night. An interesting story is that the creator of a popular Foxmail email client in China, Zhang Xiaolong, recently leaded the development of WeChat application.People know how to surf the Web
The first thing I would do was to open a browser when I spent booked computer time (in Chinese universities, it was called "machine time".). There were not too many websites in China at that time. I needed to write several popular domain names and interesting links on my paper notebook, and took it with me when I went to the computer classrooms. There were no real "personal" computers. Yahoo and other similar websites were big helpers for users like me at that time. Later when Google was known, all the portal web sites started their dying process. The new generation of web users in China, like my father, started to surf the web on their smart phones.We like sharing
httpd was the starting point of the whole Apache foundation, and somehow the same for the open source movement. httpd gave individuals and organizations an online space to share contents about themselves. Almost everyone in academic research community got a personal homepage where they talked about their teaching, research, and personal life. They easily got attention from colleagues and students.Blogs and wikis soon emerged as tools to encourage sharing, discussion, and collaboration. At the beginning, only experienced computer users knew how to set up blogs or wikis on organization servers or personal computers connected to research or commercial networks. There were so many blog software, and the one I tried was in Perl. Blog services soon kicked the blog software out and they became the major players. Most bloggers migrated their blogs from their personal or organization server to blog services. Blog readers, like Google reader, came to the hype when bloggers generated a big amount of blog daily. The reader was later killed by Google in order to give way to Google's leading social platform Google+. Google+ was the Google's answer for the emerging social content and networking market led by Facebook.
We create media
If writing blogs and wikis takes a while, just wording a sentence, taking a picture or recording a video seems easier. The success of youtube and iPhone generated an explosion of user-created media. That also very naturally makes sharing digital media the No.1 feature of the new generation of social applications. The traditional way of content distribution saw an end of its life. Newspapers and magazines become pale when every normal people can publish and distribute their stories in the media. The reception of media, no matter positive or negative, makes everyone how deeply they are connected to the rest of world.We created applications on the Web
An application helps its users to perform a task. Hypermedia itself is an application. When creating hypermedia, we already created applications.We put links in our pages to guide the readers to explore related concepts and stories. When a page is carefully crafted, the author knows where the readers will land.
We add forms in the pages to accept readers' inputs. Forms provide a way to start interactions between peers including the one who initially created the content. Comments and ratings are all forms.
Can we do more
Yes, people can do much more on the web. And in fact, we already started. We can easily define personal web sites including blogs and wikis. We can easily embed contents created and hosted on different providers. We can easily stream media from web across devices. We can easily set up personal shops without worrying about payments and shipping details. Can we go even further?What is user defined application
A user-defined web application is a web application generated by a platform from user defined specifications. It provides both basic graphical user interface (GUI) and application program interface (API). Ideally, the platform provides an environment for users to compose and test the application specifications. A user defines
- the structure and types of data that application will store,
- the representation of the data for human and other applications,
- the generation of new data and corresponding new representations that will be triggered by user or application interaction, and
- who or what applications can interact with the application.
