Software Memospheres

To me Web 2.0 means Memospheres. I can’t think of a single successful Web 2.0 app that doesn’t create (and nurture) an environment where memes can buzz and breed. The first one of these I ever saw was put together by Heather Champ… I went on about it here a while back.

So… memospheres…

• A brain is a memosphere… from a certain perspective, the first.
• A society of brains that can communicate is an extended memosphere, with a massively widened capacity for memetic-cross-pollination and memory.
• A society with writing is a memosphere with radically enhanced memory.
• A society with printing presses or typewriters is a memosphere with enhanced memory, quickened synapses and a massively increased number of participating nodes.
• A society with computers (etc etc)….
• The internet is one wacking great memosphere of connected machines and minds
• The programming platforms within this new beasty are memospheres
• Web 2.0 applications are memospheres

and so on.

Everything gets smarter and faster, but to operate in these (raw) environments you need to be a bit of a rocket-scientist, so sub-systems are created so others can participate. Microsoft rode to power on the back of this… but now sub-systems are proliferating like crazy… and the ones with realy get-up-and-go produce memes at a programming level as well as at the level they were designed for. Take a look at the number of apps that have been built around the Twitter API for example.

Anyway, I (and everyone else I suspect) kindof takes these for granted now (even though a lot of them seem to be running on thin-air)… the ones that interest me are the ones that look a bit like physical systems. eg: http://fantasticcontraption.com/

On its own it’s really addictive, but what makes it interesting is that you can build on other people’s designs, and some of them are pretty incredible… eg:

Click on it to see it in action – but you probably need to play the game for a bit to get an idea of how incredible it is. Needless to say there are hundreds of examples posted to youtube, and it looks like someone’s had a crack at a Theo Jansen’s walking machines that I was on about here.

If you want to make a real killer game – one that takes over the whole world in a way that Tetris did, make a cross between the one above and Robot wars played in a massive multi-player environment. I have a feeling that’s what Spore tried to do, and maybe they have but they bungled it with their DRM (which is memetic eugenics) and if there’s one thing that the macro-memosphere hates, it’s anything that tries to interfere with its virality.

So the Youtube was suddenly awash with cock-monsters, and this contribution, which I think is fairly funny for some reason, though obviously in the very poorest of taste.

Still, never mind about that. Apparently Aviary came out of beta yesterday,

and as far as I can gather, their Visual Laboratory app is a take on open-source art… and looks pretty interesting.

Fairly cool I think… and the first thing that springs to mind when I see their interface, is that at some point there ought to be a convergience between that, and the Bug labs modular hardware thing, which is pretty cool, but you need to be a java programmer to write for it. Remember Buglab people, worse is better.