Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

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Its very difficult for me to ascertain if its just me or the following is a growing sentiment... I'm not wowed by hardly anything that comes out of consumer internet tech anymore.

Before anyone gets out a pitchfork I have actively contributed and worked on products in the past that are part of the behemoth of services/apps/sites etc that have become mundane to me so I deserve my own criticism as well.

But the majority of launches especially for the past couple years in the media seems like the same deck chairs (mobile/social/photos/ads/etc) rearranged in a different order. Overtime Ive just lost interest in tech blogs in that I rarely see something that I'd consider genuinely interesting tech from a product or engineering or consumer perspective. Maybe I'm just getting old?

On the other hand if I'm not out of touch it seems like it could be a great time to step out of 'traditional' consumer tech and push on some of the 'new' things like 3D printing, robotics, computer vision, etc as well as seek out applications towards other industries (education, health, food, etc.)

At its heart, the internet is about information dissemination, in whatever form that information takes. Discovery has always been the issue, from link portals to message boards to search engines, it's finding information you're interested in. The current "social network" trends are another aspect of that discovery process. The difference being that an individual (or company) can more directly impact how the discovery is made and who makes it. This makes it more viable for an individual to provide information and it to be discovered. I think all of the 'mundane' applications of it you see are exploring different facets of the same thing. What we have is a specialization of one aspect of the internet (dissemination of personal information to a small network) and I think the next step will be the same for different categories of information. Not a "social network for code", but a platform for discovery that appropriately fits the niche. We then get q hierarchical discovery model where you search for where to find the information, and then search for the information. But we need all the boring steps in between to find the right model for each niche.

I'm with you, to an extent. Interestingly it was the recent excitement around the Pebble watch that made me realize how indifferent I'd become to a lot of new consumer WEB products.

I guess I realized Pebble was exciting because it was a new platform with new opportunities and possibilities. I think that explains a lot of the excitement around the upcoming "SmartTV" frontier too. Even mobile is still young enough that new, exciting applications are still pushing boundaries and blowing minds - though it's maturing rapidly.

But as far as classic web products - the web is a much, much more mature canvas with much more solidified players. Of course it'll lose some of that excitement, naturally...

"the 'new' things like 3D printing, robotics, computer vision, etc as well as seek out applications towards other industries (education, health, food, etc.)"

Totally agree. We have reached screen saturation. All the text and pictures we want. (We've had audio saturation for a long time.) The future is going to be all about machines that interact with us in the real, physical world, whether for war, state oppression, work or entertainment. Calling them robots is soon going to seem quaint.

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