I can't think of anything really creative in terms of products these past 10 years but I believe I am wrong and and older. And obviously there were more opportunities to come up with some thing really new at the beginning.
I'd be interested to know what are some innovation / new type of consumer products brought by the internet :
- in the past 10 years that are truly innovative
- since the the beginning of the internet and that have not ended up corrupt by bad actors and are still alive
Smooth piracy of scientific articles.
It took a lot of work. Other people tried different ways but it has succeeded where others didn't and even cost some people their lives they thought is so important.
Early internet was innovation. It was almost as if you had to innovate merely to get on and use it.
Now it's a commercial resource, and the major effort will be extraction.
Dislosure: I'm also old. I almost spelled "internet" with a capital 'I'. Harumph.
And it opens up a huge range of "economic games" for all parties. Not just auctions, exchanges, casinos, and e-sports betting networks. But voting, stake holding, debt issuance, derivative products, commodity peer net grid computing. As well as a drop dead simple system for the allocation of public funds.
* Same with Drone technology.
* I think voice recognition/digital assistant has evolved quite far the last 10 years.
* P2P tech is exciting again thanks to blockchain progress and various civil unrest.
Now, on any public transport (where I live) it's unusual to look up and see someone not looking at their phone.
For many, a smartphone (or, the apps on it, and I don't think the app matters so much, simply the compulsion) is the first thing to check when waking up,; many app makers simply in the business of making an app compulsive.
For many, a valuable conversation or thinking process is interrupted by an ping and 'very important' message for the constantly connected. But that's the norm for this many.
For many more, the smartphone comes before, or completely substitutes, the need for a 'traditional' computer in providing internet connectivity for many different internet use-cases across the globe: from staying in touch to banking to running a business to becoming a celebrity.
'Innovative' is also an interesting choice of word. As an amateur follower of business jargon, 'innovation' wasn't used much in business speak (it certainly existed, but in a different sense than that I observe today). In the 90s and 00s 'creativity' was the buzz-word, hand-in-hand with 'out of the box'. 'Creativity' as a term seems to have fallen off a cliff in usage a little more than 10 years ago, with 'innovation' filling the gap. But unlike creativity, 'innovation' is used to reflect thinking that is very much 'inside the box (or push the edge, but don't get out)' way. Usage of this term is slightly different from the classical dictionary definition. 'Innovation' (today) as a term seems to refers to bringing an idea that already exists to fruition, or combining several pre-existing ideas with some sprinkles on the top, or an incremental process touted as 'the next big thing' when it's what existed before but improved a little/new angle taken - not 'creativity' from the 90s certainly, the term 'innovation' representing a lower risk appetite over the past decade, and a preference of small and frequent change over the traditional one-step 'creative disruption'. Note this is my observed adoption/morphing of the term in business language over the past few years.
Starlink started in 2015 and probably will change how the internet works.
Lime started in 2017, this may work.
https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43...
It is, IMHO, a great step forward for chat rooms. It is palatable to people who would never bother with running irssi inside of tmux.