A paradigm shift: From apps to bots
I am fascinated by how quickly technology evolves. Over my short 20-something lifetime on this planet so much has changed right under my feet. Too bad I was too young or naive to notice any of it but instead just went on with the flow.
Let’s start from the mid 90’s. That was a great time in human history. The browser wars (Netscape/Mosaic/IE) were just brewing up. These browsers would shape the future of the internet that people wouldn’t even grasp at that time. It’s funny when I read that people could not understand what the internet was back in the 90's.
Just to recap the browser wars couldn’t have happened without the success in desktop computing. Apple, Microsoft, IBM had dominated the decades before and their progress in personal computers had ushered in the era of the internet. All this time I was a young toddler in Kenya,Africa who couldn’t know better and I guess telephony was even still a far fetched dream in my land.
Next came the era of dominant internet players. Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, Google. All these are companies that wouldn’t have existed if not for the internet becoming a real space. Giants like Facebook would be born later all thanks to the browser.
But the mid 2000’s had another major shift. The smartphone era was a reality thanks to Apple, a giant of the previous decades. With iphone, the appstore was launched and this created a new ecosystem of apps that would have been unimaginable before. Mobile OS was now a thing and millions of people now had computing power on their hands with more memory than was used to put man on the moon. The Android Playstore and iOS app store have dominated this era.Without them would the concept of touching a button and hail Mary an Uber arrives, even become a reality?
Again,I lived through the smartphone and appstore era but as a spectator, not really noticing all this paradigm shifts in how humanity adopted technology. In my homeland, Africa, technology advancements kicked in late and the world ignored us till I guess a time when we started using mobile phones to send money and do payment transactions on mobile. And how we figured that out is kinda still a big deal to the rest of the world.
Now it’s mid 2016 and like in the decades before some big shift is bound to happen. Its the paradigm shift to bots. These mini robots are promising to woow us in the next decade by automating routine tasks. They will live in the mesaging apps we hold dear and only use to contact our loved ones(Messenger,Telegram,Line,WeChat,Kik). If you haven’t noticed messaging spaces are the only unpolluted internet spaces atleast for now. What a great way to convince humans to embrace another great technological leap that promises to change their lives forever.
Unlike the times before I am very much alive and awake to notice this paradigm shift and won’t let it just pass under my nose. I can’t blame Africa this time round. It has infact it has availed a good playground to test out this bots thing. We are all heavily using mesaging apps and given our internet connectivity issues bots don’t require much bandwidth.
So yeah that’s what’up! It’s bots bots bots time! This graphic by Beerud Sheth, Gupshup CEO explains it better.
And here is a chatbot I built hoping that it can go tell more people about me .Go check it out and hang out for a minute with Paulchatbot.
http://m.me/716043268533217 Start by typing ‘BOT’
