Wide Area Network --> Home Network --> Personal Network

Everything keeps getting smaller and smaller. A few years ago people wrote off the "crazy people" who started to say that eventually everything would have an IP Address. Well now it seems like EVERYTHING has an IP and certainly everything hits a network somewhere. The internet may not quite be ubiquitous but things get closer and closer every year.

While a personal network used to be the network that you ran at home. Originally for the geeks among us (yes, I have had a network in my house for YEARS), then wireless (as before, first with manual configurations but now available through every retailer under the sun with easy push button setup). Well now it seems like technologies such as Bluetooth and other personal networking technologies have people running their own networks in human form without even thinking about it.

Bluetooth on phones and laptops has been around now long enough that even my mom (well, ok maybe not my mom as she chooses to believe cell phones are evil and voice mail even worse but most moms) can turn on a bluetooth headset and wirelessly interconnect. As other devices hit the market (Watch Gizmodo for a few weeks and be amazed) these personal networks will get larger and more populated. Especially as Apple gets more and more into the general consumer personal device business (this upcoming week's Macworld will be great to watch for just this reason, last year brought us the iPhone... who knows about this year) these things will get even more ubiquitous.

What a great time to be a techie.