More from the Medialab

http://media.mit.edu If you had visited the Medialab at MIT a few years ago the experience would have had a 'Jetsons like' quality in that their work would have felt very far in the future. Now that the world operates on 'Google time' that is no longer the case.

This has interesting implications; as the time horizons for developing and distributing applications shorten and the number of developers grows because of the low price and free availability of processing power you can't help wondering if the market and the population at large has sufficiently developed coping mechanisms.

I suspect the answer is that the population has and the market has not. It is only businesses and marketers that require scale, the consumer only needs to know that something is available and that it has utility. It is no longer the case of 'I can't buy a fax machine until lots of other people have one', rather the interoperability and sociability of open based web systems mean that a single user can adopt something and gain utility from its usage in the knowledge that the internet protocol offers all the worm holes to the world that you could possibly need.

The consequence of this for advertisers is that we need to look for behaviors across platforms and technologies and achieve the heady notion of aggregated individualism. More on that later.