A lot of people are talking about the changes that the web and new media are bringing to society at large, while at the same time fashion and all types of designers are digging in our past to find the good points in 30’s and 50’s design.

But let me present a tidbit that guaranteed will haunt you. This generation, this fashion, this snapshot of society in history, will be available in all it’s cultural glory for coming generations until the end of man. Facebook, Google, Youtube and Flickr are making sure that the culture of the early second millennium will be saved in witnesses description (blogs, twitter and articles) video (youtube) and high resolution pictures (flickr) until we stop using digital media.

50’s culture is amazingly alive today because of the availability of pictures and video from the decade. But when the digital material of decades is available on google for searching (possibly filtered by years, or sorted maybe? What do you think?) the game changes. The trends of today might haunt us, but there is no question that whatever we are captured doing or saying will stay with us until we are forgotten by our grand children’s children.

A happy thought no? Our legacy will live for a very long time, we will all achieve that which our forefathers struggled to do. Makes forming our lives the way we want them a bit more important don’t you think?

Back from my vacation I stumble upon a weird fact.

Free Realms is platform specific… Now, I don’t understand the technology behind the scenes of Free Realms but it seems to me that when you make  a entry level MMOG that is designed to be free fast and easy to play. You might not want to block out 10% or computer users, namely Mac user.

I just launched the website on my MacBook Pro and simply couldn’t find the play button. No information. No anything. I understand the huge difference between building for one versus two platforms but in a production as large as this and focused on such a low requirements user demographic why would this ever happen? I understand that Age of Conan doesn’t support Mac. But Eve Online and World of Warcraft don’t seem to have a problem making it profitable. Why is Free Realms not on more platforms?

Media is becoming snippets of entertainment.

Don’t believe me? Check out a few Ted talks or simply watch something good on youtube. The reason I can say this is because the Internet is letting people choose their entertainment on demand. They watch, read and play what they want when they want it.

But since there is a lot more media available then you can ever consume in a lifetime people are choosing to experience what they want now. We see short funny clips, but we might spend hours watching such clips. We also watch high quality TV-series or a new blockbuster movie but not nearly as much as we check blogs or mail.

The point is, media is getting smaller, quicker, more effectively made for individuals. We can either use that knowledge to create content that will appeal to the new customer behaviour or we can fight it and say that the people using content this way are just tech freak pirates anyway.

The early adopters are not copies of the next generation of media consumers, but they do show the trend. It has been that way for the past hundred years with Radio, Cinema and TV. Why would this trend be different?

My first thought: “Google OS, great! Go google! Wait, haven’t googles products got steadily less and less stable and good as the company has expanded? oh well…”

Then I realize this is another OS on an already shattered market (PC/laptop). Of course it’s based upon Linux but it doesn’t support a lot of heavy features. Basically it’s made to boot an Internet browser and nothing else.  This is, of course, Google’s stratagem and has been from the start. And I see their point, web apps are steadily taking over functions I used desktop apps for earlier.

But there is a long way to go, web apps are just not responsive enough for smaller tasks, I use notepad, and Things. Programs that are snappy. I haven’t seen anything web based that comes close to them in responsiveness.

Maybe HTML 5 can speed things along.