Liquid: The Mobile, Social, Connected, Webbed World

We are clearly at the tipping point of a new era in computing, and we haven’t got a great name for it. Steve Jobs used a ‘post-’ characterization recently, saying that the iPad represented the gateway to the post-PC world. But we need a term to characterize what this is, not what it isn’t.

And what is it? It’s a convergence of a number of trends, some of which are more-or-less independent, but all are coming together in a class of new devices and the tools and practices that are popping up around them.

What are these trends?

Social — The emergence of the social web — as typified by Facebook, Twitter, and ten thousand other tools — has led to the rewiring of our economy and probably our minds. The streaming metaphor of communication and connection will be the dominant motif of all important software of the next decade.

Mobile — The most interesting and explosive devices being designed and released are mobile, like the iPhone, Android phones, tablets, and the miniaturized MacBook Airs. People are increasingly using these smaller and more capable devices in ways that formerly required stationary desktop devices. This is opening up new classes of software based on geolocation, as well as the ephemeralization of many other devices and their markets, like music players, cameras, and GPS devices.

Connected — Whether sitting at a desk or standing in line at Starbucks, we are beginning to take connectivity for granted, and so will the next generation of software. We can remain connected though social tools to our family, friends, and colleagues. Although earlier solutions — cell phones, pagers, and cell modems — made this a 90% possibility, in the near future we will be 99.96% connected. (Consider that 10% of the US 25 year old and younger crowd think it’s OK to text during sex, for example.)

Webbed — The most well-established operating systems today — Mac OS X and Windows — treat the Web as an afterthought. Consider the role of the browser: a specialized program that allows us to wander around the Web reading HTML documents, following links, all of which is done in a completely different way than we wander around on our own hard drive. We use different search tools, different editors, and different conventions for accessing files and applications in these divided worlds. The rise of mobile and ubiquitous connectivity is making this look amazingly archaic, and the next generation of operating environments — like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone — will rapidly pivot into being webbed platforms, where applications will take advantage of always on connection to the web, and through the web. Among other things, this will mean the browser will decrease in importance, down to something like the Terminal utility on Mac OS X.

What is over the near horizon is a liquid world, in which social nets, ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and web are all givens, forming the cornerstones of a vastly different world of user experience, participation, and utility. This is the new liquid world, just a few degrees away.

The result of these trends all swirling together will be an increasingly fluid and immersive experience, where both services and our expectations lead to an increasingly ambient mode of interaction with devices, that will increasingly just be on and working all the time. We will opt for notification of all sorts — like updates from friends, status changes in business and perconal appointments and plans, offers from nearby stores and restaurants. We won’t have large billboards calling our names, a la Minority Report, but we will be pinged a thousand times a day by dozens of apps on a dozen dimensions of our increasingly liquid life.

I’ve written recently about liquid media, and I think the term can be expanded beyond the narrower media sense, into something broader and more pervasive. We are sliding into a liquid state from a former, more solid one. Our devices and software is where we are seeing this first, but it is already transforming the media world. Witness the headlong transition from solid media (media destination sites with their proprietary organization, with inward-focused links, concrete layout, and editorial curation) to liquid media (media content is just URL flotsam in the streaming apps we use, rendered by readering tools we choose and configure, and social curation).