Will It Be iPhone 20.30 In 2030?

TigerBlog should have included a few other things in yesterday's discussion of the past 10 years and what the future holds.

For instance, he forgot to mention the impact that the smartphone had in the last 10 years on the way communications in general and Princeton athletic communications specifically work. The impact has been, to say the very least, wildly dramatic.

The growth of the smartphone has changed how everyone consumes information, and it's made everything in the communications world much more immediate.

When TB was a newspaper reporter, you had to wait until the next day to read about the game. Often there was no other way to find out who won. And if you were a Princeton, say, fencing alum who lived in, say, Texas, you had really no way to find out who won a particular match.

Once the webpage rolled around, the ability for those Texas fencing alums, and all Princeton athletic alums, to stay connected skyrocketed. Now you could not only find out who won but also could find out who won reasonably soon after the game ended.

Live stats made it easier to follow along in-game. The smartphone took that to a whole different stratosphere.

Now, with smartphones paired with Twitter and Instragram, the in-game experience, and postgame recap have changed. Now you don't only get to see in the stats that Bella Alarie scored to give her 14 points by halftime, you can also see highlights as they happen.

When the game ends, you're greeted by a graphic that sums up the entire game in a nutshell. And the overwhelming majority of people who see these highlights, stats and graphics do so on their smartphones.

The result? Social media numbers are way up. Readership on goprincetontigers.com is down. In 2019, a little more than 60 percent of the people who access GPT do so from a smartphone or tablet. Going back just two years, more users accessed the webpage through desktop than any other way.

From Jan. 1, 2010, through yesterday, GPT had 32,294,996 page views. From Jan. 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2009, GPT had three times that many.

Interesting, right?

So what about the next 10 years? Will the smartphone even exist in 2030?

How about TigerBlog? Well, hopefully TB the person will still be doing fine 10 years from now. How about TB the daily entry?

Should TB (the person) find something to write about Monday and Tuesday, then he will have gone through the entire decade and never once missed writing for you on a business day. Of all the things that he's done at Princeton, that streak is the one he's most proud of, he's pretty sure.

What will the next 10 years bring regarding the blog? Will the audience still exist? Will technology have made it obsolete?

While you ponder that, TB will remind you that there are still some pretty good events on the schedule for the rest of the calendar year and the decade.

It starts tomorrow at 7, when the men's hockey team hosts Quinnipiac at 7 at Hobey Baker Rink. Neither Princeton nor Quinnipiac has gotten off to the start its wanted this year, but there are still 16 league games left for each.

The Tigers haven't played in 18 days and haven't played a league game in more than a month, but the game tomorrow starts a pretty busy stretch. Princeton will then be at Quinnipiac Sunday (also at 7) before hosting Dartmouth and Harvard Jan. 3 and 4 and then heading to Clarkson and St. Lawrence the following weekend before first semester exams.

Neither basketball team has played an Ivy League game yet, but that changes for both soon enough, as the men will play Penn twice in six days (at the Palestra Jan. 4, home Jan. 10) and the women will play at Penn on Jan. 11. The return game with Penn for the women will be Feb. 25.

Before all that, there's a Jadwin doubleheader Sunday, with the women against New Hampshire at 1 and the men against Lehigh at 4.

The wrestling team is at the prestigious Midland tournament at Northwestern beginning Sunday, and the defending EIVA champion men's volleyball team opens up with three matches in California, beginning Sunday at UC-Irvine.