The Next 10 Years of the Internet


"I live in Walled City," he said.

"Mitsuko told me. That's like a multi-user domain."

"Walled City is unlike anything."

"Give me the address when I give you the emulator. I'll check it out." The sidewalk arched over a concrete channel running with grayish water. It reminded her of her Venice. She wondered if there had been a stream there once.

"It has no address," he said.

"That's impossible," Chia said.

He said nothing.

From Idoru by William Gibson

Over the next decade, there will be a wide range of products and services online, from highly structured to nearly formless. The more "traditional," structured productsblogs, home pages, marketing and communication sites, content sites, search engines, and so onwill have their form and content determined mainly by their designers and creators.

Less structured products will be rich, desktop-like applications, the more interesting of which will be Internet native and built to take advantage of the strengths of the Internet: collective actions and data (Amazon's "People who bought this also bought..."), social communities across wide distances (Yahoo Groups), aggregation of many sources of data (Google News), near real-time access to timely data (Morningstar stock quotes), and easy publishing of content from one to many (blogs, Flickr). For many of these products and services, it is the users who supply the content (such as it is).

And there will also be a new set of products and services, many of which won't have associated Web sites to visit at all. Instead, there will be loose collections of application parts, content, and data that don't exist in a fixed location, yet can be located, used, reused, fixed, and remixed. The content people will search for and use may reside on an individual computer, a mobile phone, or traffic sensors along a remote highway. Users won't need to know where these loose bits live; instead, their tools will know.

Tools for the Next Web

These unstructured bits won't be useful without the tools and the knowledge necessary to make sense of them, similar to the way an HTML file doesn't make much sense without a browser to view it. Indeed, many of these bits will be inaccessible or hidden if a user doesn't have the right tools.

This is where interaction designers come in: creating tools for the next generations of the Internet. The tools we'll use to find, read, filter, use, mix, remix, and connect us to the Internet will have to be a lot smarter and do a lot more work than the ones we have now.

Part of that work is in formatting. Who and what determines how something looks and works? With the unstructured bits of content and functionality, perhaps only a veneer of form will remain. How something looks will be an uneasy mix of the data and the tools we use to engage with it. Indeed, visual design is becoming centralized in the tools and methods we use to view and interact with content, moving away from its decentralized locations on Web sites. Already RSS readers let users customize the way they view feeds from a variety of sources. Soon, expect to see this type of customization happening with bits of functionality as well as content.

Web browsers will probably be the elements most affected by these new, varied experiences. Our current browsers were designed for navigating a hypertext content spacestructured products and services, in other words. They are poor to merely adequate for Web applications, and nearly useless for unstructured products and services. We will need new browsersnew tools altogetherand interaction designers need to be involved in creating them.

It would also be a mistake to think that most of these tools will be on laptop or desktop computers. According to some researchers, the number of people accessing the Internet will quadruple from the current 500 million to 2 billion people by 2010half of them using cheap mobile devices as their means of access (Figure 9.1). The shift away from desktop-like experiences will be profound and require incredible amounts of work from interaction designers to become a reality.

Figure 9.1. A woman using a mobile phone that is part of a phone-sharing service offered in Ulan Bataar in Mongolia.

courtesy of Jan Chipchase


It is more important now than ever before that our digital tools have the characteristics of good interaction design baked into them. These tools will determine what we can do online and how we can do it and what it will feel like. Our online experiences will largely be determined by how good these tools are, in much the same way the first 10 years of the Web were shaped by the browsers we used to view it.




Designing for Interaction(c) Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices
Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices
ISBN: 0321432061
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 110
Authors: Dan Saffer

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