So, a big part of the evolution from the Internet (physical network of computers) to the Web (abstract network existing “on top of” the physical network) as the place where the action is was that people had to get used to the idea of activity happening on or over their computers or systems that they didn’t have control over. TBL (in what I guess is my favorite blog post ever) explains:

People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a few months they realized how the web works. And the re-use kicked in. And the payoff started blowing people’s minds.

Looks like we might see something similar with mobile devices:

Researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information including high quality video.

The mesh network will make use of Bluetooth or Wifi and could be used at a large sporting event, conference, or even a crowded city centre during an emergency, to swap information between handsets - even if the mobile phone network was offline. […]

“This is an early stage in the research project. We are addressing how you would quickly establish trust between devices, how you would discover them and [use them to] share information […] If you think of this as a totally unstructured mesh. It is not pre-planned or pre-organised, there is no authentication of nodes, technically speaking. Even though you have wireless connections between nodes, there is nothing pre-planned and the network just forms. It would work very well in very crowded events.” [iTnews via Global Guerrillas]

We abstracted away the wires to go from the Internet to the Web, now we might be getting ready to abstract away the radio signals to go from the hierarchical and restrictive service provider model for mobile data to…something else involving collective reuse of information and capacity that would also blow people’s minds.

Link this up with location-aware capacity, some augmented reality business, and open source mobile device platform…it starts becoming pretty clear that we may really have to finally break the habit of calling them “phones”.