I was sitting this evening tinkering with some prototype ideas for a client-facing iPad application. That led me to think about the iPad and the effect that it will have on the consumption of content. This was something I'd written about before and won't retread here in this post. I only mention this little side-note because it was those thoughts that led me to another aspect of the changes that these devices are going to bring about. Not so much the iPad (and other such devices that will surely follow), but more so, the smart phones. It is the smart phone and the real time web that are creating a very interesting "perfect storm" for disruptive innovation. What do I mean? What I'm talking about is how, for example, the iPhone and Android smartphones are feeding the real time web. These devices a driving enormous amounts of network usage.
We've heard about how much bandwidth iPhone users are using. What I'm talking about though is that all that network usage isn't just downloading/consumption of content. I posit that there is a lot of outgoing bits & bytes that are a result of users feeding the real time web. Yes, some of that outgoing traffic is outgoing email and other such "traditional" usage, but I think that the outgoing traffic is increasingly traffic that contributes to the realtime web. Applications like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and such are just the tip of the iceberg. I think that applications will emerge that are going to flood the Internet with realtime data and information. We will flood the Internet with micro-content and that in turn will result in users consuming increasing amounts of micro-content in the form of "context-sensitive", "location-sensitive" information and alerts.
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