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Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#371

Post by krylon »

vortico wrote: post #188
akkartik wrote: post #5

RSS and Google Reader. What can I say, I was young and foolish.

The fundamental question for the users here is "should I read an article on a website, which is designed exactly as the users should read and explore it and has 100% support for all typographical element, or on a third party reader which displays a processed copy of the article and requires effort to set up?" RSS hasn't died , but it is definitely not growing, as those who prefer to use it are already using it.

With Firefox, you can turn an RSS feed into a virtual bookmark folder that always contains the newest items. I am not sure if Chrome can do this, With Internet Explorer I could not figure out how to get it to work.

But it is such a cool feature. Effectively, it allows me to embed a tiny RSS reader into the bookmark toolbar.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#372

Post by nathan_f77 »

Animats wrote: post #92

Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.

I agree with that. I think it just suffers from stigma, like online dating a few years ago. It's very easy to make fun of Second Life. For example, there's a scene in The Office where Dwight has an account, and Jim signs up in order to prank him, but then he ends up taking it too seriously and gets made fun of. All the articles I've read about Second Life paint a sad picture of lonely people in their basement or bedroom.

I would like to try a virtual world with facial feature tracking, like the new Animojis on iPhone X. It would be interesting to play a multiplayer game where you communicate with voice, body language, and facial expressions.

A VR headset obscures the eyes, so you couldn't use a 3D camera. Maybe a combination of 3D tracking and sensors inside the headset.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#373

Post by namdnay »

fidrelity wrote: post #328
michaelchisari wrote: post #14

The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…

What do you think about the Brave Browser? While it's just a Chromium with an integrated ad blocker + no-track, I think their curated publisher model might change the online ad industry for the better!

I'm not sure the Brave concept really needs blockchain - it could be implemented far more easily with a centralised DB. To be honest it looks like yet another ICO cashgrab

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#374

Post by muzani »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #363

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…

I thought the same thing too. It's quite sad that talking to people is usually limited to dating, and dating has become a domain of Tinder.

I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting.

Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at the same time before it could but critical mass.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#375

Post by lowry »

RalphJr45 wrote: post #320

I thought the laptop arms race would be raw power and battery not weight, thinness and style.

Competition in laptops stalled, it is probably ripe for disruption. Looking the shameful Thinkpad 25, and the hype around it... there is a market for a developer laptop that does not suck.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#376

Post by m_t »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #276
michaelchisari wrote: post #14

The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…

IMO, the killer app for cryptocurrency is going to be open bazaar. What is open bazaar? Simply put - it is a peer to peer decentralized market place. Think of a something like amazon except no fees to sell, no restriction on what you can sell and powered by bitcoin. Right now the software does not work fully because the only crypto you can use it bitcoin which currently has high fees. The devs are going o switch to u…

There's no fee (except, you know, for the fees).

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#377

Post by iEchoic »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #321
CryoLogic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat. But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses). So maybe they aren't that successful after all.

Yes, that one totally got me as well... An app whose only novel idea is that the messages and photos you send delete themselves after some time, except for the fact that once they're in your friend's phone, they can of course take a screencap, or just have an app installed to store them... so the whole idea is based on cluelessness about basic security... and yet, there it is.

It's not based on cluelessness, people are aware that there are ways to circumvent the screenshot notification. The vast majority of people don't install third-party apps to save their friends' snaps, so content you share on Snapchat is still drastically less likely to be on someone's phone forever than if you were to send it some other way.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#378

Post by amelius »

kobeya wrote: post #39

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.

Yes, the only direction seems to be that of closed systems. Smartphones will probably never be as open as desktop systems once were.
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