"You're not thinking 4th Dimensionally!"

I remember watching Back to the Future II as a kid and calculating how old I would be in the year 2015. The way things stood, I reasoned, I would be almost 30 when hoverboards finally came out so I probably wouldn't have one just for fun, but I could still use it to commute to work, right? Or would I just drive my flying car all the time? These are the questions I would try to address as I sat at the coffee table with my colored pencils watching Star Wars, drawing the bright, colorful future of my geeky young imagination.

It's now about halfway through 2009, and it seems hoverboards are nowhere in sight. I don't have my jetpack or flying car, and I had to put on my own shoes this morning without the aid of power laces or even a robot butler. The new millennium, it turns out, is far more mundane than we had hoped.

On the bright side, I guess I can watch YouTube on my phone.

There's been a lot of hooplah this morning about "Web 2.0" being the 1,000,000th word in the English language; apparently a word-tracking algorithm site or some such construct dredged that fact up from the bowels of the internet and submitted its findings to CNN. I highly doubt that this is true, as it seems a little too coincidental to me. As a long-time geek and trawler of the 'net with a healthy appetite for cynicism, it seems to me that CNN (along with whoever is behind the word-tracking computational device), is instead trying to "mainstream" the term for the masses. "Web 2.0" has been getting thrown around for years now in geek/techie circles and has been used to describe everything from MySpace to Twitter. In the web design world it's used almost mockingly, referring to overuse of gradients, gray-on-gray color schemes and buttons with slow fade animations. Its "accepted" definition has come to encompass any site or web-service that facilitates networking, allows two-way communication, and is "polished" enough to be considered a "web app."

I find it funny that so much fuss is being made now about "Web 2.0," as other people are already talking about "Web 2.5" and "Web 3.0." All these titles and terms are nonsense, of course, as the internet is evolving far too quickly for any sort of taxonomic classification. Interestingly enough, while it used to be the "cool rarity," it now seems to be standard for any website to allow some sort of system for talking back and commenting on everything from news stories to paparazzi photos, nowadays often using their Facebook accounts. Facebook, it seems, has a goal of becoming some sort of underlying structure for the internet, as it worms its way into other websites and services with "Facebook connect," allowing users to comment, share, and post using their single Facebook account. Google seems to have a similar approach; dreaming of a day and age when users will need no other application but their web-browser. (Case in point: I'm writing this from Google Docs!) It's a little frightening to imagine the internet having such power and reach but, I suppose at the very least, it's the start to "standardizing" the internet.

I, admittedly, am in love with the internet. When Skype allows me to see and talk to my girlfriend from thousands of miles away or when Twitter allows me to communicate with my favorite authors and artists I sit back and beam, marveling at my small slice of "the future." But all of this amazing development doesn't come without its bad qualities: for every one amazing site or service, there will be hundreds of thousands of videos of people farting on each other.

My dad used to be a VP at AOL back in its early glory days; he's got the plaques to show for it, and he (along with his collegues) is arguably one of the good ol' pioneers of the internet. One of his "noteworthy achievements" was his participation on the AIM team, and I remember he used to tell me about his dreams of an internet allowing for greater and greater communication between people. I asked him once about his thoughts on how the internet has grown and he just shook his head like a man whose daughter has become a stripper.

I remember the very first time he introduced me to the internet. It was back in 1993 or 1994, when I was no older than 6, and he came home from his job at IBM telling me there was a "new game" that he wanted me to try out. I'd been using a computer from a laughably young age, accessing "Mickey Mouse ABCs" from a C:/ command line, and so I was always down for a new game. I swept my bowl-cut out of my eyes, pushed my coke-bottle glasses up my nose and we booted up something called "Prodigy" on our big boxy IBM tower (through DOS, no less). A blue screen with big 8-bit yellow letters came up: "WELCOME TO PRODIGY" it proclaimed, "WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO?" We navigated, ever so slowly, through various menus until we came to the "Kid's Zone." I remember scoffing at the rudimentary graphics and bleepy-bloopy sounds of the Sesame Street game portal and its inferiority to such technological masterpieces as "The Secret of Monkey Island," (aside: still one of the greatest games of all time) but looking back on it, I realize that even that must have been quite the breakthrough.

Right now, I'm sitting at work on a ludicrously thin iMac, word-processing on a website, and I'm l looking at a picture on my iPod that my girlfriend just emailed me from Hong Kong using her phone. Ho-ly. Crap. It's a bit mind-blowing if you actually think about it.

So. I may not have the future that Doc Brown and Marty McFly showed me in BTTF II, with its robots, dehydrated food and 80s stylings, but this future's still pretty awesome I guess.

And, on the bright side, there's still six years for hoverboard technology to come out, right?