If I were a web 2.0 couples therapist, here’s what I’d do:
Record a lot of the couple’s conversations and analyze them with IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization tools. A great way for the couple to see their patterns of communicating. (Hey, I bet my word map would show that I say “Yes, but …” or “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” a million times).
Embed a light-emitting table in the kitchen counter and set it up to give visual feedback on all the hot spots in the couple’s communication. Even I might be embarrassed to keep saying “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” if I could see the frequency with which my kitchen counter started emitting blaring red lights.
A little more complicated than reading “Men are from Mars” (or is it Venus?), but much more effective. And if the relationship fails after that, there is always revenge on YouTube ala Trisha Walsh-Smith.
What if your real life is pretty difficult, and there is not much you can do about it? Well, virtual life can sometimes provide more realness than real life, especially if you have the spirit of Alice Krueger. She can’t get around easily in real life, but she has created a community to help others on Second Life.
Her story was recently featured at the Health 2.0 conference on Web 2.0 technologies in San Diego.
3-D printers will be cheap enough in a few years for ordinary home use. Of course the printer will be yet another technology item to fit into an already crowded house, and the frustration level with the usual printer jams and misprints (imagine the mess and the waste of materials) will be sky-high. And for the near future the materials will probably be limited to things like various polymers, cornstarch derivatives, wax, and chocolate. But it would still be so much fun to own – kind of like a grown-up version of the Easy-Bake Oven.
These printers will cause an odd transfer of control, with the consumer now becoming the manufacturer, and new intermediaries springing up to provide the design programs. The ability for anyone to rapidly prototype inventions or variations on existing products should lead to massive creativity.
And when the printers are sophisticated enough to allow embedded electronics, the practical uses are unlimited – imagine making your own light bulbs, flashlights, cell phones, and for me, a remote to replace the one my dog ate. My guess as to the most popular items to print will be not be the practical or the innovative ones, however, but the true basics – chocolate body parts for adults, and small plastic toys for kids.
I love the idea of Amazon’s new e-book reader, Kindle – it is really seductive to imagine carrying around all of your reading in one small device. Books are my basic security blanket – if I am going somewhere where I might, say, have 1 hour of downtime, I usually take at least 4 hours of reading material “just in case.” The Kindle would be great for me.
But I’m far too cheap to buy it. I don’t mind the $400 purchase price, but the on-going cost is way too high for me. The fact that you have to pay for blogs is almost a deal-killer, but the cost per book is really prohibitive at $10 or so per book. At the rate I like to read and/or skim through books, that is about $40 per week, or $2000 per year. I get out roughly 20 books a month from the library for free, and until the library starts to offer free downloads to Kimble, I’ll have to pass on buying it. Well, maybe it’s best to wait a while anyway – by the time they come out with version 2, it will probably have added color and images and much more web interactive capabilities. And then I’ll load my security blanket with at least 10 unread books at a time. I can’t wait.
