STATS: He started off with some data about internet usage (many pulled from here), most notably mentioning that there are currently approximately 1.7B Internet users in the world (also adding that as Google’s ‘Internet Evangelist’, he “still has 75% of the world left to go.”).  What was interesting was his focus on what the numbers really meant – while Asia only has an 18.5% Internet penetration rate, that still works out to about 704M people, which is still more than 2x the entire US population.  In addition, he mentioned that there are currently 4 billion mobile phones, a fact which was new to me, and which implied that most people were using mobile phones as their primary conduit to the Internet.

Major Changes: He also shared some of the major changes that were happening soon.  One of these was about the Internet’s current switch to IPv6, mentioning that we were on track to exhaust the stock of IPv4 addresses by 2011 (perhaps sooner if there is a rush for addresses at the end).  He mentioned that the new 128-bit addresses would allow for 3.8 x 10^34 addresses – “a number only Congress can appreciate”.  In addition, he mentioned upcoming changes like internationalization of domain names (allowing non-latin characters in top-level domain names).

Applications: He then did a whirlwind tour of the kinds of applications that are supported by the Internet (mostly seen through Google’s eyes, of course).  Email (GMAIL), Video-Sharing (YOUTUBE), Maps (GMAPS), you get the picture…It was interesting to hear him talk about Google Wave, because even though he spoke about it with conviction, I noticed that it was still difficult for him to really express the use cases for the service, something that I (and many other people) have had a bit of trouble with.

New Types of Devices: He talked about the grand proliferation of internet-enabled things.  This is a topic that I’ve long had some interest in and have been desirous to get involved with (beyond playing around with my Nabaztag, of course).  He actually got into an interesting anecdote about installing temperature sensors in his wine cellar that text messaged him when the temperature rose above 60 degrees.  He talked about possible additions to this project, including actuators to turn on the cooling system remotely, and RFID-indexing all of the bottles to keep inventory.  This transitioned into discussion of putting sensors in the corks themselves to deliver information about the wine, which reminded me a great deal of Bruce Sterling’s discussion of “spimes” in his book, “Shaping Things” (a quick, interesting read, btw – definitely recommended).

Challenges of the Digital Age: Finally (skipping over some things), he talked about 2 big challenges that he saw for information handling in the future.  The first was the phenomenon of ‘Bit Rot’ – he applied the term not to the decay of physical storage media, but rather to the idea that we might just stop deciding to update programs, and thus 1000 years from now, we’ll never be able to see that Powerpoint presentation from 2004.  The other grand challenge he brought up (something he has been heavily involved with) was the creation of the “Interplanetary Internet“.  The idea (linking things in space to the Internet) is relatively simple, but the execution (as one might expect) is somewhat hard.  Challenges such as vast distances (speed of light actually becomes a factor when Mars gets as far as 235 million miles from Earth) and planetary rotation (now you see it, now you don’t), have led them to develop a Delay-Tolerant Network protocol that uses a “store and forward” approach instead of trying to achieve end-to-end communication.  Their plan is to use as nodes satellites which have been re-purposed and re-programmed after completing their original mission.

Anyways, the talk, which covered everything from mobile phones to cloud-computing to internet-enabled surfboards to Googling in space, was interesting and inspiring.  In case you want to watch it, PARC has started putting up videos of the PARC Forum talks, and you can find the Vint Cerf talk here a few days hence.

Loopt:

Loopt: Friend Map

Latitude:

Google Latitude: Friend Map

Of course, it is difficult to completely ignore the extra features that Loopt offers or Latitude’s clean look, and many other blog posts discussing these aspects have gone into a lot of detail comparing the two. However, I think that these types of comparisons ignore the fact that these two services are fundamentally the same and suffer from the same fundamental flaw, what I think of as the Catch-22 of Map-Centric Social Networks:

1. Nobody is going to visit the service regularly unless they are getting useful, reliable information.
2. Nobody is going to get useful, reliable information unless everyone is visiting the service regularly.

Loopt or Latitude or any other service can roll out as many features as they want (Journal, Mix, etc.), but the core service that these applications offer won’t become even remotely useful until I stop seeing days or weeks-old status and location updates.  Given that most of my Loopt contacts are iPhone users, it’s possible that this may change if Apple actually does roll out an update in June that allows apps to run in the background, but then that raises all sorts of other questions about the perceived “creepiness” of a service tracking your whereabouts 24/7 (I write this, of course, after having just suffered through “Eagle Eye“), and it will only be the most intrepid of early adopters who will click OK when the “Loopt would like to use your current location…forever” option pops up.

At some point in the future, I really do believe that we will all be comfortable with having all our locations/preferences/activities tracked, as we start to understand the benefits that can be reaped in terms of computers being able to anticipate our actions and serve us better.  In my mind, the only core difference between Loopt and Latitude as they stand now is that Google will be able to fund Latitude for several years until that time comes around, while Loopt will likely have perished much sooner.  In the meantime, an interesting problem is looking at how we can design location-based services that maximize the utility of these services to the point that users actually feel compelled to update because they will gain access to useful, reliable information about their friends while minimizing any “ick” factor.

The first step, I think, will be to give up on the map as the hub of these services.  This is an idea that I have explored a little bit, and some applications have already hit the iPhone app store that take this approach to networking (Borange comes to mind).  I haven’t yet heard any feedback on Borange or any such services, so if you have, it would be great to have you share it here.