Television is still the preferred mechanism, though, for whiling away those ever-declining hours between work and sleep. While the broadcast media have high hopes for the new digital transmission protocol that will phase in over the next three years in North America, their avarice will remain unsatisfied when they realize digital television is just another word for specialized computer service. The much-promised convergence of television and computing is at hand, and the result looks suspiciously like a networked computer. It is said that your true friends are found in your address book, not in your neighborhood. As everyone's life becomes organized on the Internet, you will be more likely to gather your friends together in an electronic community than at a backyard barbecue.
Electronic communities are no longer the exclusive domain of the socially challenged.
Netscape's Communicator is an early glimpse into the future of the universal client. Netscape calls its product the universal desktop, but the company underestimates its own technology. Desktops are for computers. Universal clients are, well, universal. One of the challenges of a ubiquitous interface is allowing for variations in the underlying hardware of the client device.