Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

At the drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won’t be a minute.” She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lit a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking…. He put his shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

— The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
James Thurber, 1939

I suspect that there is a bit of Walter Mitty in all of us. Certainly, as a writer, bits of Mitty live within me.

I sometimes imagine, as I drive through the nighttime skyline here in Cleveland, that one of my past relatives sits next to me, examining the future. The relatives I imagine are from mid-1800s Cleveland, and everything is prime for the taking, especially the technology.

And what an exciting time to be looking at it all: it took humanity almost 2.4 million years to develop language, another 15,000 years (give or take) to develop the printing press, 450 years to develop the computer, and less than 50 years to create — and populate — this thing we call the Internet.

Add to this the cell phone, which of all the technological evolutions has been adopted faster than any other technology in history — 20 years (free registration required for link).

The Mitty in me sees a future where your cell phone will function much like today’s iPhone: a powerful phone/mini-computer, wirelessly connected to the Internet (via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or some other as-of-yet not created technology), which we will either wear or carry with us as we go about our daily duties. Go into the office and you’re connected. Go home and you’re connected. Go to Starbuck’s and you’re connected.

It will be like the tricorder from Star Trek: it’ll do just about anything, and will be loaded with the applications that we’ll need to go about our business. Like the iPhone, it will have a touch-screen and a method of extracting visual information from the Internet.

And the information we connect to is what we are building today: the data architecture of tomorrow.

The Walter Mitty in me can see a corporate honcho in the car on his way to a meeting, taking a phone call from a frantic client needing his sales report from the month prior. He says, “No problem. I’ll get it right to you,” accesses his company Intranet, downloads the document, and e-mails it right then to the client — instead of telling him that he’ll do it first thing tomorrow morning (and promptly forgetting about it).

All of this technology is supposedly about saving time, but I’d prefer to suggest that it’s more about developing, sustaining, and nurturing good relationships — and all the richness that good relationships provide.

Which is why we, as developers and designers, must continue to work together to standardize what we do and how we do it to make adoption of these future technologies simpler and easier.

Copyright © 2008 by IdeaStar. All rights reserved.