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What services do you miss?

You can ironize as much as you like about “problems of the first world”, but digital civilization really brings a lot of inconvenience. The Internet brings down tons of content on us, on social networks invitations to obscure groups from unfamiliar people are pouring, and how many more little things you still want to get rid of in order to calmly work or relax?

Today we have prepared for you an overview of areas for the development of new services and technologies that could solve these problems. You can dream about them and discuss your thoughts in the comments. No fiction about teleportation and flying cars - in most cases we are talking about the evolution of existing products. If you are a developer, this article may give you some food for thought.


Photos - Daniel Mingook Kim - Unsplash

Read in a new way


We spend most of the day online and consume more and more information. Someone is trying to sort interesting pages according to lists in the spirit of "someday I will read later." Someone shares work, entertainment and educational content into separate streams.

In the end, attempts to put things in order are beginning to take more and more effort, and it becomes clear that this problem cannot be solved by simple means, something new is needed. Some time ago, this issue was discussed at Hacker News and formulated the concept of a service for automatically creating reading lists. Such a system should understand which topics are of interest to the user at the moment, and which may interest him in the future.

“Social networks are optimized to engage the audience, i.e. ad delivery, writes thundergolfer. “They only think about what you click on today .” A new approach could build a long-term informational diet and correlate it with the timeline of human life - school, higher education, career building, parenthood. ”

According to thundergolfer, he despaired of waiting for such a product and decided to tackle it himself.

More than books


The engineer and developer Jonathan Borichevskiy, whose post was the basis of the discussion at Hacker News, paints an even larger picture. The service of his dreams should collect useful information from all available sources: books, articles, discussions on social networks, notes, presentations, images, audio recordings ... All this must be processed, brought to a single format, prioritized and then offered at the right time.

“For example, I have two hours to go through the interesting content that my friends sent me last week ... or watch relevant videos,” Jonathan dreams.

The appearance of such a solution will require expanding the existing set of multimedia formats, making them more compatible and available for conversion. The next possible step is to completely rethink the existing formats. For example, books. They could become interactive collections of hyperlinks with constantly updated content. Thus, authors can supplement their works at any time, and readers can leave not only notes, but also extended edits in their own branches of works. But for some, such an idea may seem doubtful - anyone can already publish in this form on the conditional GitHub.

Platforms for Authors


From the consumption of content to its production. At all times, the main problem of the author was to find a way to his reader. At one time, 12 publishers refused Joan Rowling, and almost all music stars had to fight for label attention. No one knows how many talents have not received their ray of glory. The advent of social networks, streaming services and video hosting was supposed to solve the problem and simplify the life of creative people - such platforms opened access to a global audience for everyone. But making money with creativity has not become easier, and instead of impregnable managers in labels and publishers, authors have to fight with ranking algorithms .

The situation may change in the coming years, and the key to these changes is decentralization or the concept of “ Publishing 3.0". She suggests that the authors will launch their own sites, instead of upholstering the thresholds of major market players. According to Orna Ross, head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, writers should get rid of the “one-dimensional” view of their work and independently seek a path to the reader. “With decentralized systems, by the end of the 2020s, we’ll get away from a situation where the publisher controls access to the audience,” Ross says.


Photos - Mareko Tamaleaa - Unsplash

The basis for all this already exists and is used in all. Twitch video streamers livethrough donations, actually selling the audience personal contact with a professional gamer and authoring the presentation of entertainment content. And around them grows an entire ecosystem. Here are services with copyleft-music, for which videos are not banned on YouTube, and corporate sponsors seeking to reach the audience of each individual streamer.

New social networks


If you go back to social networks, everyone seems to be tired of them now. The Like button at one time seemed interesting, but by the end of the decade it had become a symbol of narcissistic vanity, and the engineer who invented it began to talk about the dangers of social networks for the psyche. All these events take place in the context of constant data leaks from large services, and society seems to have already formulated a request for new social networks where people will understand who they are talking with, what data and where they are giving, how to close their information from prying eyes. Such services are called vertical - they will unite people by field of activity. The idea itself is not new - Behance, StackOverflow, even Habr in their own way are vertical social networks.

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For scientists, the massive rejection of the excessive capabilities of large social networks was not a surprise - as far back as the 90s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar calculated that we were able to maintain no more than 150 social connections. This is due to the limitations of our brain, which has not yet been rebuilt from the time when it was physically difficult for a person to meet more new faces in life. And it is entirely possible that the future awaits us with a variety of micro-networks.

At least the developers already offerplatforms for launching such sites. There is a whole range of familiar features - from profiles with social graphs to news feeds and comments under posts. This distinguishes these services from group chats in messengers, where chaos sets in if the number of participants exceeds 10-15 people.


Photos - Austin Chan - Unsplash

The idea of ​​launching your own media service may seem redundant, but everything can change very quickly. Sociologists distinguish between generations of the technologies that they use. As the VKontakte generation did not want to sit in Odnoklassniki, just as TikTok replaced Snapchat, so the upcoming services may well throw off the current ones from the ship of the present. How exactly this will happen, and what ideas of new services could contribute to our convenience of work, study and consumption of entertainment content, is an open topic for discussion.

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