Top Trends Timeline 2010-50

An Australia/UK based futurist, Richard Watson of Nowandnext.com has, with some collaboration, drawn up a very complex timeline of trends for 2010 and going into the next 40 years.

Though a I enjoy visualization of concepts, this map is not that easy to discern at first glance. It takes a bit of time to spot the pattern, and further to absorb the content. The original full diagram is available here.

Like a Metro/Subway/Underground map, there are lines that trace a certain category or subject such as Healthcare & Medicine or Geopolitics through a minefield of trends, marked as dots/circles. The more important the trend the larger the circle, and is more likely to contain more intersecting lines. Starting from the centre region which corresponds to the 2010-15 period, there are outwardly radiating regions of time up to 2035-50. Perhaps it should be called a time-map.

Many of the trends such as speech-recognition, cloud-storage, and declining fertility are already here in some form, while others further out in the timeline still belong in the domain of science-fiction - DNA repair, invisibility cloaks, Animals suing humans.

Watson invites any comments or suggestions on his blog page here.

Chemistry of the Internet

My colleague, Simon, passed on this website to our group today morning. A lot of frivolity, guffaws and laughter ensued.

It seems to be a chemists attempt to make sense of things on the internet, by following the model of the Periodic Table of Elements. A number of well-known (and not so well-known) online websites, services and software are organised in the table, represented as boxes. Columns stand for categories such as 'Search Engines', 'Internet Tools, 'Blogs', 'Operating Systems', and the row is used to mark the rankings of the website. Each box shows the Symbol, Sit URL
and Rank. By clicking on any of the boxes you're taken to the corresponding website.

I can be very addictive serendipitous experience. It took some effort to tear my attention away onto more 'pressing' matters.



The website can be found here.

Mindmeister - Mind Maps try to go Web2.0

Just a few years ago, many computer technology gurus thought that delivering Rich Interface applications, such as Office applications online was not worthwhile. That the interaction would be very limited and the online application would not provide a satisfactory response time. Now with broadband, tecnologies such as AJAX and applications such as Google Documents that door was been thrown wide open. One of the latest, an online mind mapping service, Mindmeister, has just been launched. I had been involved in testing the beta version and recieved the following email on May 2nd, 2007:

" We are very proud to announce that after a thorough private beta phase MindMeister finally went live last night at 11pm CEST!"

The free basic account lets you create upto 6 mind maps, to get unlimited you'll have to go premium. Mindmeister includes a Web2.0 component by allowing you to share your mind maps with others and work collaboratively.



The premium account also additionally allows the user to export the mind map in formats such as FreeMind and Mindjet Mindmanager, the user can include the map in blogs and websites, kill the advertising, and provides full SSL encryption.

The limit of this application to just 6 mind maps for free is against the spirit of the times. It severely limits any true usability for most users and will hamper the success of this endeavour. Perhaps sometime in the future, the boys with the big cash - Google or its equivalent - will buy this company out, set the application free with unlimited storage and unleash its true potential.