Just checking out netomat, a Java multimedia personal message / website / blog thingy.

I am wrestling between saying how much this doesn't excite me at the moment and how much this suggests to me an interesting future for individually created interactive multimedia, e.g., as social software.

From my lack of excitement, I am thinking about Flash sites that aren't interactive with anything outside them, e.g., you can't bookmark a frame in a Flash movie, or you can't link to a frame, etc. They suffer the classic signs of the antisocial website.

From my imagining of an interesting future with this, wouldn't it by fun to be able to easily make silly multimedia communications instead of only writing emails and blog posts or sending text IM, etc.?

I mean, if you could easily make silly multimedia communications, you could start to get some art out of it. (The priority of easily being able to make business communications, I think, eliminates much of the impetus to make art. There is very little PowerPoint silliness or art, right? Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it!)

One disclaimer: with the iCite net, I am totally working in the text realm right now. So, any comments I make about anything other than text are probably warped through lack of exposure. Ahhhh! It has more than 256 colors! And it moves! I feel like my brain is going to explode! (Have you noticed that this site has almost zero image graphics? My RSS feed buttons on the right are text. Even my flashy rollover logo / homepage link in the upper-left corner is just text.)

Man, I need to get a real job so I can afford a Mac. There is only so much of one's life that can be lived in a text editor. (Though, I did help build Arjuna's site a while back, and do still get to use Photoshop once in a while, even on my PC.)

I am babbling, so and I hope Marc Canter sees this and says some more cool things about how to integrate multimedia with everything.