We’ve previously discussed Michael Mandel’s contrarian argument that we are on the cusp of a communications boom. Here’s more suggestive evidence:
* John Markoff of The New York Times reports on a number of new advances that promise to further the miniaturization of computer memory, a crucial first step on the road to ubiquitous computing and intelligent cities.
* And more prosaically, the launch of Gmail’s phone service brings us closer to the end of long distance charges, as Farhad Manjoo observes in his Slate column:
At the same time that home phone service gets better, it will keep getting cheaper. You will never again need to pay anything to call anyone in the United States, either in dollars or minutes. International calls will fast approach free for most countries that are well-wired with the Internet; only the most remote or internationally isolated places, like Nauru and North Korea, will remain expensive to call.
I was struck by this in part because I remember reading a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke that anticipated the elimination of long distance charges, and at the time I considered it a marvelous if distant prospect.
* Farhad has also commented on the fact that we’re winning the war on spam and, more importantly, on “bacn”:
On Tuesday, Google is launching a remarkable new feature in Gmail—a system that sifts through your daily flood of incoming mail and picks out messages you’re likely to deem important. The new system, called Priority Inbox, is the opposite of a spam filter. Instead of looking for keywords that mark unwanted mail—”Buy now Vic0din 3o% of!”—Priority Inbox looks for signals that a message is especially valuable. Among other things, it analyzes your experience with a particular sender—is a message from someone whose mail you tend to open and reply to? Was the e-mail sent only to you, or was it part of an e-mail list? Did the message contain keywords that have proved interesting to you in the past? If a message makes the threshold for importance, Gmail marks it with a small yellow tag. These messages will appear at the top of your inbox, above the rest of your mail.
In small but important ways, all of these steps will contribute to greater productivity and prosperity.