Embedded systems have always been about putting compute power where the application needs it, whether that is on a factory floor, in a car, or in your hand. There have been many predictions of complex, high-minded applications for the next generation of these devices, but there is a refreshingly down-to-earth treatment of the current state of the art and near future in an M.I.T. Technology Review article on Social Computing.

The pertinent difference in this next generation of the Internet is that it is not a highly-structured set of vertically integrated applications. Instead, it is a fairly cobbled together set of loosely-coupled services. These are built much like the command-line utilities in a Linux system, where a set of simple applications can be coupled by a set of simple rules to do powerful things. This does not force computers to interface with us in a human way, but instead provides a simplified and consistent technical interface that can be manipulated at a slightly higher level of abstraction. In other words, the code is easier to write.

No, this is not the Jetsons, but it is still pretty cool.

Larry Mittag