I’ve often thought the time will come when you will carry all your data and applications in your pocket to be accessed whenever you need on what every computer and connection is available.  This makes sense when you think about it.  You don’t carry a TV around with you; you expect one to be in your hotel room.  So why should you carry a heavy laptop around when you only need the power and the screen real estate on occasion.  On my recent trip to Italy I lugged my lap top along and ended up never using it. My iPhone was all I needed. But I didn’t need to create any graphic designs or write any code.  

I look to Steve Rubel as being on the forefront of the traveling user’s work paradigm.  He correctly points out we’ll be using more devices not fewer.  There won’t be a single device to meet all your needs.  Certain applications require large screens and faster, larger computers others don’t.  But what ever your computing needs you shouldn’t have to have your data distributed all over the multitude of devices that run the applications. 

As Steve points out:

” With PCs and desktops everywhere we'll be soon booting more off USB drives. Linux, Google Chrome OS, Mac OS X and Windows, etc. will all run off portable USB drives that we'll tote from PC to PC (or in Apple's case, Macs to Macs). The OS and its entire suite of applications will run off the devices which ensures your data stays yours.”

Steve uses a PC desktop at work, at home a Mac, on the road a netbook, and everywhere else an iPhone. With all his data is in the cloud the majority of the time all he needs is a browser.

The day is coming where all you’ll need is a smart phone and a secure USB drive that will have every OS and application you use available for use on the device they run on.

I’m looking forward to it.

As social media tools evolve and I become more experienced in what works and doesn’t, the proliferation of social networks has created a need to seriously think through my use of the tools and how they fit into my content creation and dissemination process.

Steve Rubel has recently shared his content creation and dissemination process in this post.

I started using Posterous after Steve explained how it created a hybrid between real-time Tweets and slower cycle analytical blog posts. Adding Posterous to my toolset immediately got me into trouble with multiple posts from duplicate services feeding FB, Twitter, etc. so I had to layout the information flow and decide which service should feed which network just as Steve shows in the graphic above.

All this suggests we are reaching the point in the evolution of the tools and the experience of the users that would enable the creation of a platform to manage content creation and dissemination and make the process much simpler.