ThisIsLeon.co.uk

The early part of the 21st century brought many new buzzwords and phrases. IT professionals are no longer known simply as the ‘computer guy’ but instead have names such as Software Architect and eLearning Developer. Gone were the days of sticking an ‘e’ on the front of everything to make it sound futuristic. Even sticking the Apple ‘i’ in front of everything was starting to get a big weak.

The internet needed to evolve into something more that just a repository of information. It needed to grow almost by itself. It needed to be used for socialising as well as information.

Enter social networking a.k.a MySpace and facebook et al. These sites have made it possible to view what a friend was up to online. For the first time, it was cool to have virtual friends and the image of geeks locked away in their bedrooms on chat rooms was starting to fade. Having more virtual friends was more popular that having real friends. For the first time average people were friends with celebrities.

Enter 2008 and the shift is starting to move to having the internet in your pocket and being permanently connected to the web and the world. At the touch of a button it is now possible to update your Facebook status while waiting to be served at the bar. Twitter enables friends and family to share quick responses to the answer: What are you doing? This seems pointless if you have to log onto a desktop or even laptop computer as your status is not always current. Phones such as the iPhone allow users to get the internet pretty much anywhere this is a mobile signal. This sort of power has created a new type of internet: one where information and data about the user is submitted in the background.

The mobile scrobbler app for the iPhone will automatically update the user’s last.fm profile with the song that is currently playing on the iPhone. The user could take an image and this could be automatically uploaded to flickr with the user’s location.

This I believe is where the internet is going – to a state where the transfer of information from user to user is instant and silent. The effort has been removed almost to the point that there is no extra step to update a profile or Twitter status. With is abundance of data is also the issue of storing it safely.

My vision is to create a set of web services which could automatically create a profile of the user based on their daily activities. This blog aims to get as close to that as possible by displaying information from various web services and social networking sites all in one place.

Welcome the new geek. Spending time on the internet and sharing information and data is no longer solely for nerdy teenagers, it is for everyone.