All we are, are links in the wind, dude…
For some reason I am hearing these words said by Ted from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure… “All we are, are links in the wind, dude.”
When a recent random IM came up, I answered it with my usual jerk attitude that I save for random Africans with a pre-loaded scam trying to pull the trigger.
As the conversation toiled further and further down the road of idiocy, and it’s very usual for me to even entertain it to that point, a blog occurred to me and here I am.
“I link, therefore I am.”
I remember the early days of the Internet, really before the “web” because the only browsing was Mosaic and the only pages were all listed in this handy “Internet Phone Book” you picked up at the book store because search didn’t really exist either.
So in those archaic days, when Internet tools had names like IRC, Gopher, Archie, Telnet and FTP, the only chatting was done in a desktop application (or a command line if you were a Unix/Linux geek) and if you wanted a photo, it was either DCC sent, or emailed.
You could also usually expect NOT to get one because digital cameras cost $600+ and almost no-one had one. There was the still expensive flat bed scanner and the ever popular Logitech hand scanner, but most people didn’t have those either.
Back to the story….
So this person asked if I had a photo and I responded that she/he/it (who knows) must not have looked too closely at my profile because besides there being a photo there, there were also several links to MySpace, Flickr, etc.
This is when the ray of light came from just beneath the catalectic converter and I was presented with my own proverbial gloves. (I’ll send a Google Laptop Sleeve to the first person who gets that reference in a comment!)
The days of sending things are really over. I don’t care what your media of choice is…video, photos, audio, even entire libraries of personal information. It’s just a link these days. I am lucky enough to have philoking almost everywhere, so I can send a simple link via IM or email and share almost anything with anyone.
So the question in all of this is, will a link be like a phone number some day? Some alias that is your IM, your email, your voice, photos, videos, audio….. a handle like philoking that covers everything I could want to share? Will Myspace or Facebook be the first one to figure this out?
Give me Facebook, Skype, Flickr, Gmail and Meebo in one UI, and I will give you my soul. Ok, maybe not my soul, but mad web props yo!
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment