I think realtime reporting IS the future, and dashboards that show live, pushed information are going to be ever more ubiquitous.  Hardly any exist right now, but Sprint as part of its “now” marketing campaign has put together a great live dashboard over at http://now.sprint.com/widget/

In addition to more common widgets from World Population to “top words being used online”, there are a bunch more, such as “911 calls being made” to “sticky notes being produced” to “transplants today”.  Some of the more amusing ones are:

- A “push now” button, which (predictably) does nothing, but reports that 66,713 other people have clicked it
- “You, now”, which takes your webcam feed to show you, now
- A “habitable planets” counter

While you’re browsing all of that, a female voiceover provides more realtime data, such as  ”The earth will travel 18 miles between right now… and now”

Genius, and here’s hoping more useful versions come along soon to gadgets near me.

1.  Triumph of the cloud – following on from Amazon’s EC2 services and the like, and from early attempts such as SETI@home’sdistributed search for E.T.  Verdict: quite likely, but conflicts with the growth in cheap-yet-powerful small webtops, mobile phones crammed with technology, and the commoditisation of high tech

2. Cyborg chic- by 2018 people will be evolving into cyborgs.  Though I think it will take (a lot) longer (viz Arthur C. Clarke predicting in 2001 – A Space Odyssey that we’d be colonizing the moon by now).  But head-embedded phones aren’t too far away, maybe 2025

3.  Everything works- a joke prediction that everything digital will work, though the prediction of “it even changes based on what you’re currently doing” is one I’m pretty much focused on right now…

4.  Nothing escapes you.  In other words, everything you do and experience lives on in a digital vault somewhere.  Actually, pretty useful and scary at the same time.  But inevitable.  Some people are “life logging” already

5.  Smartphones take center stage.  For sure they’ll be more ubiquitous and ever more useful, but I don’t think they’ll replace laptops/PCs in their current form.  Unless we evolve matchstick fingers and zoom lens in our eyes, we’re all of one broad size – and that size needs a keyboard and a screen.

6.  Human-free manufacturing.  Robots rule.  I thought this was already the case?

7.  Perfect image recognition.  Object recognition in images is being worked on all over the place, for sure, and everyone’s favorite human-shaped robot Asimo is currently learning to recognise objects.

8.  Big Brother never sleeps – yup, if we’re not being tracked already through every step we take, we’re about to be.  The UK government right now is trialling satellite tracking technology to help us all live better lives.  Sorry, I meant to tax us more and fine us if we pause on double yellow lines too long…

9.  Unbroken connectivity – that would be good

10.  Relationship enhancement – using technology to enhance our offline relationships (e.g. automatically storing their kids names for future recall).  Sure to happen.

Finally, then, a couple of my own along the same lines:

11.  Today’s top online brands won’t be the top brands in 10 years or even less (Facebook, Google, etc).  Hard to imagine, but almost guaranteed.

12.  Unified messaging.  I don’t actually care whether the message I just got was through Twitter, an SMS, the Blackberry Messaging service, interpreted voice via Spinvox, an email, smoke signals, or someone shouting across the room.  I really just care about the message.  Unify them, please, before I go mad.

10 Downing Street (home of the UK Prime Minister) has 3,800 followers, for comparison.

Lots of truth in that one, I’ve seen slides like 36 a number of times…

Almost reaching those dizzying height of views is this collection of “accidents” on docstoc:

Why I Got Fired – Get more Creative Writing

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, Avril Lavigne managed to get over 93,000,000 views on this music video, and on digg.com, the cracking of DRM protection made it to 49,000 diggs.

What does this all say?  Well, the most popular stories aren’t necessary the stories of interest to everyone – and in each situation above there is probably a story behind the popularity which promoted that particular item to the top.  For the same sort of reasons reason that “yahoo” appears to be the most popular search term on Google, popularity doesn’t mean interest or relevance.  But it might be a good pointer, if taken as part of a metric for determining what is “good”.