Now that everyone's got a snazzy browser in their iPhone, it seems like the Internet has become our real-world intelligence confirmation unit. I can't recall the last time I was at a party or eating dinner with some friends, and when a point of consideration came up, out came the phone for instant Wikipedia validation. Web browsing is now social, just forced through a straw.
This kind of collaborative browsing, while still fresh and new, seems to be an evolution of co-browsing activities such as Medium and other fairly new sites on the scene. But what I'm really interested in is the following:
How do you make browsing the Internet a real-world, at home party activity? How do you work together in one physical space to assemble and share entertainment and knowledge? Do you have multiple input devices? A giant touch screen with a natural user interface? Do you control it with your mobile device? It's not good enough to each have our own Internet appliance. We need one appliance that we can throw all of our thoughts onto, like a digital whiteboard mixed up with a browser, to mush it all together. Just imagine the overload of great stuff, all there on one big screen.
Of course, then we'd need a drinking game to go with it as well.
We were having a great time party surfing this past weekend. When having friends over for dinner recently, our postprandial activity consisted of calling out links we'd recently enjoyed, then surfing to the appropriate URL and sharing the information out among the group. After a while, practically anything one of us said became a URL to check out.
Big technology and game companies, get right on it. I'm sure there are at least twelve people that will pay $500k for such technology in their palatial homes.
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