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What is the future of personal computing

reading your email, which is superimposed at 25% opacity over the real world. Imaging calling up your music library and being able to look through titles, covers and play lists without using your hands or holding a device (other than perched on your nose). Imagine getting directions via your GPS device and having them displayed in real time overlaying the roads you're currently driving on. Imagine never having to buy another monitor again.

Imagine the lawsuits! Our near future is going to be a very exciting time!

When you visit a web 2.0 site today, particularly a social or bookmarking site such, you're almost always given the opportunity to tag what you're looking at. Tags are simple, single or multiple word descriptions of a thing. It doesn't matter if that thing is a link to another website, a video, some artwork or a piece of software. If that thing exists on that site, you can tag it. Tagging makes your stuff easier to find and sort by you, and opens up your stuff for the whole world to sift through and take a gander at, based on the tags that you and others have assigned. That's the social part, right?

Now imagine tagging the real world. It will be like Google Maps but in the real world, in real time. You eat at a restaurant and the food is inexpensive and fantastic! As you're leaving, you glance back at the door, and tag the restaurant with "cheap, excellent food, wonderful service, 5 stars". You can choose whether you want to keep these tags to yourself, open them up to a select group of friends or publish them for the whole world too see. You publish them for the world and 10 minutes later a couple from out of town wanders by looking for a place to eat. They see your tags and decide that this is the place for them as well.

It's such a simple thing but it will change our world drastically. Will you rely on a Zagat's guide again if you can see 17,423 personal tags for an individual eating establishment, and sift through them quickly to immediately display a 1-5 star result based on individuals who have eaten there in the past? Tagging stationary objects via GPS is easy. It's already being done. Tagging moving objects is next to impossible unless those objects are under constant surveillance or have a GPS locater on them. I'm sure GPS locaters are going to be built into these, not for a big brother sense, but for an ease of use sense.

Great, now people can tag other people! What if you yourself were tagged. What would my life be like if seventeen other people


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