Walking in "The Cloud"

"I just have a month's subscription left. So I need to recharge my Cloud Service. I just have to switch on my terminal and log into my account for extending my subscription. It will take just few seconds and that's all, and it comes at a very nominal rate, with most of its services free of cost and a plethora of apps to choose from. It's really awesome. I have recently turned into a developer and I need to host my apps. So I will require few more services than the normal users. Sometimes I even get money for those cool apps that I make. I feel really great when millions of users use my app and its so easy to host them these days. I just need to register and sign in. I don't even need to worry about maintaining it. I am no computer geek, but I do have a cool website and make plenty of cool apps just by drag and drop. Ah! its such a beautiful world. I love walking in the cloud. These days I don't have to manage so many accounts in Facebook, Orkut, MySpace. I just have a single account registered with my Cloud Service provider and it allows me to manage all from there. Each one of us have a public profile in the cloud as if everyone of us is a separate entity with a key to distinguish ourselves from one another. So whenever I need to mention any of my friend or someone in the cloud while writing my status updates , or my blog , or while making my presentations and docs, the cloud just detects it and provides a link to his/her public profile. It also gives me recommendations of his/her works available in the cloud. The cloud is so intelligent. I call it the Genie.What's more......its not just people , everything right from places to cars and the laptop that I use are separate entities these days. It has an amazing visualization capability. I just click , and it visualizes my entire network with all the familiar profile pics. I see them everyday on my big LED display. Whenever I become curious to know about anyone's current status i just keep my finger on his/her node and it shows me the status summary. I can do the same from my mobile, from my laptop and also from my ipad. They just act like windows, and whenever I open these windows, the Genie is waiting outside to serve me. I just provide my wish list to him and he grants every one of them. So that's how it is in 2020."

That's not just me, it's going to be any commoner talking like that in 2020.It seems to be a dream today, but fortunately it's going to be "the reality" in the future. It's the dawn of Web 3.0, Semantic Web, The Cloud, The Genie or whatever fancy term we use for it, and it has arrived with all its potential to unleash itself and spread itself among the common masses. It was the computers that got linked to one another in early days of the internet. Then the web had pages which got linked to one another. Now, these pages have immense amount of data. With the dawn of the Web 3.0 , its time for these data to get linked. What’s more interesting is that these data are about the users of the web and the things about which they write and discuss on the web. The amount of information available from these data will help in disambiguating these people and the things which they talk about making each one of them a separate entity. With this huge amount of linked data available, the future is going to see a new platform which will be more intelligent than what we can imagine today, taking the virtual society of the web more towards the realistic society and making the modern society fully dependent on it.Living in the cloud would be like living in the bits. We talked about the atoms and molecules as the constituents of the living society. Now its going to be the bits, the new constituents of the virtual living society. We are going to be wired up by the bits. It will be a society of data, and the world is going to be a huge cloud of linked data.

It will be available to everyone as a service, just like we have our mobile phone service with prepaid and post paid schemes. The devices, TV, Laptops, ipads, phones ........all of them will just be windows to it. Soon the web will encompass the whole population of the world , as Kevin Kelly , the founding executive editor of the Wired magazine puts it in his famous TED talk [10] - “There is only one machine. The web is its OS. All screens look into the One. No bits will live outside the web. To share is to gain. Let the One read it. The One is us”