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Our FineArtViews editor, Carrie Turner, recently interviewed me for a new series for our members about the FASO team.  One of the questions led to an answer that was too long to be included in the original interview, so I've posted my answer here instead.

What are some of the things you’ve seen change the most since you started FASO?  Were you able to foretell the future of certain developments?  What were you most surprised by?  Any predictions for future developments?  

On the consumer side, the two biggest changes in the past decade are the rise of social networks and the rise of ubiquitous mobile computing.  On the provider side, the biggest change is that utility computing is now a reality...although it’s now been given the “sexier” name of “cloud computing.”  I’ll talk about each one separately.

Social Networks

Social networks can be leveraged in powerful ways, but, due to the money involved in being a major social network, we’re in danger of losing some of what made the web so wonderful.  The web is a magical, democratizing technology.  An artist can show and sell their art from their own website, can share their thoughts on their own blog, all in a way that cannot be taken away by some controlling company.  It was a wonderful thing when people moved away from the closed, controlled walled-garden of AOL and onto the vast and wonderful open web. From the mid-90’s to the late 2000’s the pace of web technology exploded due to the fact that we all were open and shared technology with one another.   But what did we (geeks) do?  We’ve pushed people into Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.  Facebook is the new AOL.    The fact that people are willingly moving vast bulks of their content away from open technologies like web, email, sms, and rss and into closed, controlled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest is probably the thing that has surprised me the most.  I’ve also been surprised that some of the early open “don’t be evil” tech companies have started pushing people out of their open technologies and into closed networks.  Google championed the open technology of RSS with both Feedburner and Google Reader.  But now, with them needing to monetize Google+ and compete with Facebook, they are shutting down Reader and I suspect Feedburner is not far behind.  That’s a specific example a wonderful open, free solution (RSS) being killed for an inferior, closed solution (Google+).  If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend you read The Web We Lost by Anil Dash:  http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html  .  In regard to the big social networks, my advice would be to utilize those networks to promote your site, blog and email newsletter, but don’t allow any of those networks to have your primary content and don’t get in a situation where you are reliant on the existence of them.  They can and do change their terms in a heartbeat.

Mobile

We all knew mobile was coming. We had all seen Blackberry’s success and knew something even greater was coming soon. It was an easy trend to predict, but hard to know exactly when it would arrive.  It was also hard to prepare for because it wasn’t clear exactly what form the “mobile revolution” would take.  The announcement of the iPhone was the tipping point.  The past few years have seen rapid advancement in the technologies necessary to make the mobile revolution a reality: small, fast processors and memory that consume very little power, better and smaller battery technology, tiny cameras, affordable hi-resolution touch screens, and affordable 4G data plans in most geographic areas.  We are truly, finally living in a mobile connected world.  FASO sites have supported mobile devices for several years, and we have an iPhone app available app store that allows you to upload art and manage your site from your iOS device (iPhone, iPod, iPad).  However, mobile technology moves rapidly and 2013 is the year that we are revamping our mobile strategy and expect to be pushing the good foundation we’ve built much further in the coming months.  It’s going to be a fun ride!

Cloud Computing

The best way to explain cloud computing is with an example:  In the early days of electricity, there was no delivery system.  If you wanted electricity in your home, you had to buy a generator or do without.  The electric grid revolutionized things because after the “electrical cloud” (the grid) appeared, you could simply purchase the number of kilowatt-hours you used.  You no longer needed your own generator.  Computers, similarly, have been in the “need your own generator” phase until now.  Until a few years ago if you wanted to do computing, you had to purchase your own computer.  So if you wanted to host a web application, you had to buy your own server, or lease space on someone else’s.  Cloud computing turns computing power into a “utility” like electricity or water.....you simply pay for the compute-hours that you actually use.  

Cloud computing has revolutionized the tech world. There are thousands of apps and startups created each year.  This wasn’t possible even a few years ago.  Starting an internet startup used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and a good chunk of that money went to buying servers, storage, bandwidth and people to manage it all.  Due to the rapid advancement of cloud computing, that cost continues to drop due to the rapid advancement of cloud computing.  For example, the powerful architecture that Google enjoyed in it’s early days is now available to almost every startup who utilizes the cloud.  And indeed, a friend of mine, has been running his own search engine,  https://duckduckgo.com/ that is on track to surpass 50 million searches a month soon.  Until a few months ago, it was just him. And yet, he’s been featured on CNBC [http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000161097] and his site is about surpass AOL in terms of traffic.  That’s the power of the cloud.

The vast computing power the cloud affords is why you’re seeing the number of companies and the number of apps and web applications explode.  Having computing power available any time you need it drops the length of time the innovation cycle takes and pushes things forward at a faster and faster pace.  That’s great for all of us.  Look at something like Instagram [follow me here:http://instagram.com/clintavo] - a social network based on photos taken with smartphones and all pushed up into the cloud in real time.  Instagram couldn’t have been built without the three technologies we’ve just discussed.  Instagram literally wasn’t possible until about the time that it appeared.  Innovations like that push all of us forward and consumers get better and better products.

To see how the three technologies have converged in FASO’s offerings to make life better for an artist read this post.

Predictions

Predictions are always risky.  But the next areas in tech to blow up, I suspect, are going to be:  wearable computing, 3-D printing and Big Data.  Our computers will get even “closer” to us than smart phones.  Think eyeglasses that overlay data into your field of vision (already being prototyped with Google glass) and ear pieces that whisper in your ear when you’ve forgotten someone’s name.  The cloud makes big data processing possible.  We’ll be able to mine unfathomable amounts of data for useful knowledge (Google search and the human genome project might be considered early examples of “Big Data” but, now, all of us can do it at a reasonable cost).  And 3-D printing - the ability to simply print any object will revolutionize a huge number of industries, from medicine to robotics.

How does any of this affect art?  I’m not sure. I think one positive trend for artists will be as everything becomes so digital, so reproducible, so ubiquitous, there will be an increasing demand for hand-made, unique, artistic things.  I suspect the demand for art will increase as these things come to pass.  Also, as digital shopping becomes the norm, more and more people will be comfortable making big art purchases online.  Think about the glasses I mentioned.  Imagine walking through a gallery and having the artist’s data instantly available when you simply look  at a painting.  Just tell your glasses you’re interested and the data will be overlayed into your field of vision.  One other thing I always wonder will printing technology ever get good enough and cheap enough that art prints can be delivered digitally? Just like MP3’s of music are now?  Or will e-ink screens get so good and so indistinguishable from real paper, that we can frame wireless e-ink screens to hang on the wall  and purchasing a “print” will be as simple as downloading music from iTunes?  Who will be the “iTunes of art?”   I suspect there will be new marketing opportunities these technologies will open up that we can’t even conceptualize at this time.

You can read the full interview here.