 This isn't the web, right? Once upon a time it was hence this amazingly crusty-looking desktop computer, right? But this is the sort of web that we've been used to for the past 20 or so years. But that just simply isn't the case anymore. As was just mentioned, right? We have all these different devices, this flood of devices. We have smartphones, we have dumb phones, we have netbooks, we have notebooks, we have tablets, we have e-readers, we have game consoles, we have internet-enabled TVs, a whole lot more. All of a sudden the concept of the web becomes a whole lot bigger. If you think about it and look at it, you know, a lot more complex, a little more daunting, right? But perhaps what's more important than, you know, all the things that are in existence today is what's right around the corner, right? The last session showed us sort of the future of, you know, all these devices and, you know, of course there's the fabled tweeting refrigerator, right? Stuff like that, you know, printers with detachable tablets. Microsoft actually developed some technology that projects a screen over your windshield of your car. Like talk about like a literal blue screen of death, right? If that fails, it's off a cliff, right? But perhaps, you know, all this stuff is out there already, right? You could go to a department store and buy, you know, a web-enabled refrigerator at the second, right? But what's more important than the devices in our periphery are these question marks, right? Nobody knows. Not even the best informed in the world knows exactly what the device landscape is going to look like even two years from now, right? You know, you sort of think you have it figured out, all right? We're pumping out a bunch of black rectangles, and then all of a sudden, bam! Google comes out with Google Glass, and it's like, well, that happened, right? How do we react to that? It's crazy. So it's impossible to say that we could actually create anything that's truly future proof. And you hear that a lot. Oh, we need to future proof our site. We need to future proof our, you know, our product or service, whatever. But just because it's literally impossible to say that we could create anything that's future proof, that doesn't mean that there aren't things that we could do today to better prepare us for what's in store. So that's really what being future-friendly is all about, is really acknowledging and embracing the unpredictability of the future, right? Change is the only constant, is a phrase that's thrown around a lot, and that's especially true when it comes to this tech landscape. So, you know, in order to sort of change, you know, how we operate, we need to change the way we think and we act. Easily the biggest thing we could do as creators, right? Not just for the web, but in general, is to focus. And this is especially true because people's capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing. So what I mean by that, right? This is a website. This isn't the greatest example of web design ever, but it's also not the worst, right? But if you look at that highlighted little area there, right? That's the only reason anybody would find themselves on this web page, right? But it commands such a small percentage of the screen real estate, right? In case that isn't explicit enough, right? A whole lot of bullshit. I was on a dictionary website looking for a definition, and I was like, where did I miss something? Where? Ah, yes, there it is. It's amazing. The sole purpose of that website is to give... All right, is this ever happened to you, right? Click a link, get a million pop-ups, subscribe to our newsletter, like us on Facebook, sign up for our sales, right? Every time that this happens, this is what goes through my mind, right? Welcome to our website, screw you, right? We, as users of the web, right, we're getting really, really good at circumventing bullshit, right? You don't like your reading experience on the web, you use a tool like Readability or Instapaper, Flipboard or Safari Reader to have a much, much better reading experience, right? Don't like ads, ad block plus. Don't like TV commercials, use your Tivo or your DVR to skip through them, right? You know, you pay for an online subscription to something and they still show you a bunch of ads before, right? Pirate Bay or BitTorrent. I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying that that's what people are doing, right? Again, we're getting really, really good at circumventing all the bullshit, all the roadblocks that content providers are putting up in our way. So it's essential to focus, right? Focus on what it is you're working on, whatever it might be. It could be a website, it could be a business, it could be a product, it could be cat ears, what is it that you do? And focus on that. Focus on what really, really makes your product, makes your service, makes your organization stand out. And we're seeing this happen because, again, people are so frustrated with their current experiences that, you know, we're finding ways to get around it, right? Service is like simple, which is a, you know, sort of digital online bank is, you know, trying to compete with these big, clunky banks, at least in the U.S., right? Who are just giving users a miserable, miserable experience, right? This is an alternative. There's a new, anybody heard of Forecast.io? It's a nice little web app that, believe it or not, just presents you the weather. What a concept, right? You know, a weather app that actually presents you the weather. Not a bunch of extra bullshit, right? It's absolutely essential to define what it is you do and focus on that, and everything else will fall into place. And once you have that focus there, it's really becoming absolutely imperative to make sure that it, you know, is able to go to as many places as possible. Stephanie Rieger, I love this quote. She says, the most valued products will be designed to live beyond the device that context or technology they originally intended for. That's exactly true, right? But here we are, and we sort of talked about this, you know, yesterday. I'm sure we're all familiar with this person, right? I got a great idea for an app. Really, so does my grandma. Right? But again, it's about that focus. So what is it you're actually trying to do? Focus on good ideas, focus on sound ideas, on honest ideas, on sincere ideas, right? Whenever you look at services like Netflix and Amazon Kindle, right? Netflix isn't just a website that streams, you know, movies. It's a way, you know, to provide digital movies to people wherever they might be, right? The Amazon Kindle isn't just a $70 piece of plastic that you can buy, but rather a quick and easy way to buy and purchase and read e-books, right? These are solid service ideas, right? These aren't just websites, these aren't just apps. And one of the core parts of being future friendly is investing in that infrastructure, right? It's about sort of taking a step back from individual channels and making sure that your data, your content, your service, your product, whatever it might be is as portable as humanly possible, right? A sort of poster child of this which actually Karen talks about in her book quite a bit is NPR, the publisher in America, and they have all these different content sources, but then they wrote this really robust API that's very, you know, channel agnostic. And then as a result, they're able to port their content, they're able to pour their content into all these different containers, send it to all these different, you know, apps, websites, mobile websites, Times Square, NewsTicker and stuff like that. It's crazy. That's becoming absolutely important because I love this picture because I look at it and it like knocks the wind out of me every single time. I look at it, I'm like, ugh, this is our reality, right? We don't get to choose, you know, oh, let's pick and choose which devices we're going to support, right? This diversity is, you know, becoming absolutely imperative for us to pay attention to and it's a tremendous opportunity for us as people creating for the web, right? Because the real power of the web is its ubiquity. You can't create an iPhone app that can reach all of those devices, right? You can't create an Android app that's going to reach all these desktop screens, TV screens, mobile screens. The web can go to places that these apps and stuff can't, right? Tim Berners-Lee sitting awkwardly in the middle of the stadium at the London Olympics, right? Tapped out on his computer, you know, this is for everyone, right? The web is for everyone, regardless of race, religion, color, creed, mobile carrier, right? But the problem is that we're sort of, in the present day, still thinking of the web on these sort of, on these mobile devices, on these smaller devices, that's sort of a less-than-web experience, right? Does this ever happen to anybody? Sorry, that page is supported on mobile at this time. Follow my health. Currently requires a desktop browser. A mobile version will be available soon, giving us that false sense of hope, right? Is it soon yet? Right? It's available on our current full HTML website. No Doritos for you. This gallery is not supported on mobile at this time. The story you're trying to reach isn't supported at this time. Looks like you're using an unsupported browser, even though you're on a perfectly capable Android device. Pizza Hut. Keep up the great work. Doing a great job, right? Slavery Footprint, which is a really beautiful website about how we're all sort of inadvertently contributing to human trafficking in this day and age, but they have some long-winded excuse about why all that great content isn't available on small screens. This one's great. This website contains media too rich for a mobile web browser. I can't be bothered with you, peasant device. Right? Be gone. This is Google's mobile web initiative page, and it says, alternately, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one. I don't know what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure it's a tablet. This one still takes the cake. This page has to be ideally opened on your laptop or desktop browser. Once you open this link on your computer, then you will have a QR code to the URL that needs to be opened on your device. A human being wrote that. And I will find them. Right? But what we're getting at, and what we're seeing more and more of is that mobile users will do anything and everything a desktop user will do. It just has to be there, right? We just need to provide it in a usable way, right? There's a lot of really sort of highfalutin words and concepts about this, right? The one web principle. This concept of thematic consistency where, yeah, okay, things can look a little different or behave a little different, but as long as the core content's there, that's what's really important. But I find it most effective to just speak in very human terms. Give people what they want, regardless of how they access the web. That's pretty basic. It's pretty hard to accomplish, right? What it requires is achieving what I call content parity, right? Content parity just means giving people what they want regardless of how they access the web. So a quick example of this. This is an older version of Nike's website, right? So they have this hip website. They're advertising the Nike Pro Combat Hypercool 2.0 product, right? Then you go over to their dedicated iPad site. Yes, that's a dedicated iPad site. And wow, things look a whole lot different. And then whenever you go over to the mobile view, they actually have multiple mobile views. One for the iPhone and one for everything else, which the everything else one is looking quite brilliant right there, right? So they recently did a redesign. It's not responsive or anything, but if you look at it on a desktop, you look at it on a tablet, you look at it on a mobile device, you could see that, wow, okay, that content sort of seems similar across the board. And it really begs the question, right? Does content parity trump all? Is it about creating this super catered experience for mobile devices or tablet devices? Or is it just more important to actually give people the content functionality they're after, right? I like to say get your content ready to go anywhere because it's going to go everywhere, right? I love this picture of devices because that articulates that point so clearly, right? And it's also important that it's like, okay, well, so now we have, we have mobiles, we have tablets and we have desktop, easy. We got these three little buckets. Jason Grigsby does a lot of thinking around responsive design and he's saying, you know, it's becoming increasingly impossible to really draw a hard line, you know, between what is a desktop, what is a tablet, what is a mobile device, right? We have so many, you know, desktop devices that also have touchscreens, we have tablets that detach from laptops, you know, we have all of these things sort of, you know, it's becoming impossible to sort of create a catered experience across the board. And that's where responsive web design comes in, right? We finally have sort of some tools in our toolkit to create a more sort of agnostic but still optimized experience for all these different devices. And it's, again, becoming so increasingly important to do that, right? We have to embrace the sort of general squishiness of the web, right? We can no longer think in terms of just, you know, a desktop context with rigid fixed widths but rather think of, you know, unique ways of how we could translate our interfaces across all these different devices, right? John Alsop, who was very much the inspiration for Ethan Marcott who coined the term response of web design, has this great quote that talks about how the web is this fluid medium, right? It doesn't have the same constraints as mediums of pass, wherever we have these fixed dimensions, right? We have, you know, it's not a piece of paper with edges, with hard edges. So we need to sort of embrace the ebb and flow of this very fluid medium. So that's, you know, how we can sort of translate a single design across a bunch of different screen sizes. It's becoming more important than ever, right? What we also just saw in the last session, if you were here, is that, you know, these devices and these systems, some even without an interface at all, are all starting to communicate with each other. And that's becoming absolutely important in our day and age because as the last speaker just said, you know, Moore's Law is still very much in effect. We're beginning to put chips in everything. We're being able to, you know, communicate with our surroundings. Right now we have a bunch of smartphones, we have a bunch of tablets, we have a bunch of desktops, you know, all sitting in this room, but they're all sort of not aware of each other, right? But that's sort of quickly changing as well, right? We're starting to slowly realize new methods of interaction to really make the most use out of each stream's strength, right? This is my friend Luke, he runs an app called Polar and he partnered with Microsoft to sort of show how you could actually have a mobile phone, you know, interacting, or you could interact with your mobile phone while your tablet's sort of doing something different, while you could be watching a video on the right side of your screen, but you could also sort of see the updates of your polls on the left panel. So these are all ways that the webs can sort of work across different devices to create entirely new experiences. And again, that's becoming really, really important. And right now we're seeing a lot of this in the sort of native world, right? You see the Apple ecosystem, right? Anybody has an Apple TV, you could stream your iPhone to your Apple TV, you could stream from your iPad, you know, all those devices can work really well together, but the problem is that it's a very close system. And of course, as we know, the device landscape is much, much bigger than Apple, right? So what if you have a Samsung TV and an iPhone and a Microsoft tablet, right? How do you sort of bridge that gap? How do you make everything work well together? And again, back to the ubiquity of the web, it's a great medium, it sort of becomes this glue that allows us to sort of stitch these different devices together. And again, Google recently came out and they said that, you know, 90% of users will start a task on one device and end up, you know, finishing it elsewhere. And again, so we need to start thinking about the continuity of our experiences, right? What we're really getting at is that we don't know what's going to be underneath Christmas trees two years from now, right? But that's what we need to be designing for today because there's a damn good chance that those things are going to have access to the web. If you think about it, even things that you made in the last year or two are being interacted with on devices that didn't exist when you made them. And that's just a crazy concept and that's not going away. And probably the best thing that we could do whenever it comes to being more future-friendly is to be more present-friendly, right? Be more aware of the devices that are out there today, do a better job at trying to support more and more operating systems, browsers, you name it, just get your content in front of more people. I'd like to say that today's bootcamp is, or I'm sorry, today's landscape is bootcamp for tomorrow's insanity because this isn't going to slow down, this isn't going to get very much easier, right? It's important to say that this stuff is legitimately hard, but it's absolutely necessary, right? We have to continue to move forward, right? We're in too young of an industry. The web's only 20 years old. That's like, we're in like 0.0001 second after the big bang right now. There's so much opportunity, there's so much to learn and there's so much we can do to evolve our skillset. I really love this quote from Benjamin Franklin, right? When you're finished changing, you're finished. I think that that's especially true with what we do. I also think that it's really important to keep an open mind, right? Different people solve the same problem in a bunch of different ways and it's important to understand that, this ain't religion, this is web design, right? We're all on the same team, we're all trying to make life better for each other. And let's face it, this is really, really fun, right? All these devices, sure, they pose new problems for all of us, but it's also just a big puzzle that's just waiting to be solved. And I love that, I really do. There's currently six billion mobile subscriptions in the world and 2.4 billion people have access to the web. This is sort of what it's looking like, right? We still have a lot of feature phones out there, a lot of people without the web, but there's this overlap, right? These are two of humanity's greatest achievements, hands down. And this is the trajectory, right? More and more mobile devices, more and more people with access to the web. In years past, in generations past, we'd be very lucky to just work in one of these. But yet here we are, right smack dab in the middle of these two amazing technologies trying to figure out how it all works together. I can't think of better problems to have than to think of what the web is, where it can go, who it can reach, how it gets used, and why it matters so much. So, thank you. There is. There's my dog.