A New Dimension?

I feel in my gut that we need a new dimension, a new vector, a new lode to mine.  And I feel that we are close to finding it. 

Note the conscious use of the word we in the last sentence.  I am not close to finding it, but we are.  By we, I mean everyone who is working in technology and web services.

Software and web services have been about functionality for the past thirty years.  They help you organize and process the things you need to do.  At this very moment in time, I have six applications open.  Outlook for email.  Outlook for calendaring.  Outlook for contacts.  Word for writing.  Firefox for browsing.  iTunes for listening.  I could have more, but that’s all that I am doing right now.

Each is an island (or a ghetto as a friend of mine says) of automation with efficiency as the ultimate end goal.  Microsoft largely won the “organize and process” era because they offered the most efficient applications using the DOS/Windows operating system as the foundation for delivering efficiency.

There is progress being made connecting these islands of functionality in the browser.  I can write in Firefox (and oh the pain of a browser crash), I can listen in Firefox, I can do email in Firefox, I can do calendaring in Firefox, and so on and so forth. 

The browser is replacing the OS.  Big deal, we all know that.

But once that happens, then what?

Many have said that search is the new dimension. Google’s success would certainly suggest that they have found the next lode to mine and are doing a damn good job mining it.

But I think search is just one of the vectors and that the new dimension is relevance.

And search isn’t the ultimate in relevance.  In fact, I think search is a very rudimentary way to deliver relevance.

Many readers have said to me, “Fred, why are you making such noise about the cookie thing?”

Because I believe that relevancy is the next dimension and stored user preferences and data are the foundation of delivering it.  Cookies are one of the ways to do that and I think they are a very important part of the next big thing.

But this is about a lot more than cookies.

It’s about understanding how the next 10-20 years are going to play out in technology and web services.

The Gotham Gal was looking for some stuff for the kids yesterday on the Internet.  She is one of the best Internet shoppers I have ever met. She knows all the best tricks of finding what she wants.

But she said to me that the Internet is getting really crowded these days.  There is so much stuff out there.

Information overload?  No, we were overloaded ten years ago.  What we are today has no word for it because we are too busy checking our non stop email deluge to think of one.

We’ve largely solved the “automate and process” problems. 

But we haven’t begun to scratch the surface of the relevancy problem.

So grab your picks and shovels and let’s go mine that lode together.

Comments

[David Gibbons]

... couldn't agree more Fred.

More thoughts on the (coming) irellevance of search:
1) Think back to a time when "search" was less convenient than tapping into your network for advice. Search used to be a schlepp - reserved for only those rare mysteries you couldn't tap your network for a relatively good answer to.
2) Right now search is more convenient than networking - because it's the only tool for accessing breadth of the web's great content. Search has been essential to experiencing the web because it's so vast - in "Linked", Barabasi says that there are "19 degrees of seperation" between web nodes - and as we all know, search engines can't keep up with the growth.
3) Now throw Web2.0, especially blogging, into the mix. Our blogs are a collection of our social networks - our loose and strong ties. Barabasi also shows that what used to be "6-degrees of seperation" between people on our planet - it more like 3 - today.
4) So, what Web 2.0 does, is it actually compacts our expanding web - weird - huh? Our social links (3 degrees) are much tighter than the web's network is today - as a result as the web becomes more populated with Web 2.0 content, it rapidly shrinks, allowing more and more relevant content to flow to us via our social links - leaving us with increasingly less to search for.

Wild - but looking at google through these eyes, it's clear with blogger etc. that they're ahead of this. I agree that the interesting space is the new opportnities created by the shrinking web - it's going to be fascinating to see what we come up with.

[Raj Bala]

Parallel to the point you're making, my interest lies in corporate or enterprise relevance as it relates to and affects the storage layer. They are currently islands of inefficiencies --- either over provisioned or under provisioned swells that are often times out of sync with corporate governance. We just have to make sure that we don't use dynamite when a garden shovel will do.

Anyway, great evening read Fred!

[charlie crystle]

I'm guessing when you say "relevance" you also mean "context". Even the silos don't provide context very well, don't tie everything together, don't do much more than organize according to what we struggle to tell them.

Let me add interfaces. We tolerate bad UI in exchange for cool new things. We miss the message when we say Google search is important and AJAX is cool and RSS moves stuff about nicely. Google is easy to use, Google Maps is cool and easy to use, and RSS isn't about how things are moved around but that we can easily get stuff we like.

I'm going to brag here. Our UI is pretty good. It's going to get better, but my point is we invest heavily in UI, because our customers find technology threatening and hard to use, and because bad UI leads to support calls and nasty emails. Plus we like things that are easy to use.

The guys at Google tell this story of how they occasionally get an email from someone with just a number as the content. After a while they realized the number represented the number of words on the landing page, and the emails only showed up when there were more words than usual.

You can do lots of cool things with software. It doesn't mean you should. Word and Outlook aren't very easy to use, partly because of the way their functionality is organized, and partly because there is way too much functionality for most people.

Easy email, easy documents or publishing, easy contact storage, easy search, easy easy easy. Even complex hard stuff should be easy. It's time for thngs to be easy, not just iPods.

[Michael Arrington]

Fred, it sure looks to me like your thinking is starting to go parallel with Steve Gillmor and his attention idea.

[Mark Sigal]

Hmm, relevancy is job specific so I think a lot of this comes down to the creation of workflow oriented applications (I know, yucky term) that are content and context aware.

Put another way, the simpleton might say instead of giving me a generic web services platform which can do "anything" or an applied web service that runs well as an island give me a set of two or three fully formed "applied" web services that leverage common repositories, have well formed methods and logic for dealing with application integration in a more than the sum of the parts fashion.

I have written a blog on O'Reilly that develops this thesis more fully and tests it against some use cases. It's called Envisioning RSS as a Web 2.0 platform.

[Ash Maurya]

Another perspective and solution to this overload/relevancy problem is that of the User Centric Web which goes even a step further. In a nutshell, the User Centric Web effectively turns a desktop or device into a URL addressable web server that can selectively serve up content to a select list of people (your social network, for instance). Allowing people to selectively share any content directly from their desktop, in an open and standards compliant manner, opens a whole new world of possibilities towards personalized content delivery.

One such project (open source) that is already underway towards realizing this is the WiredReach Content Sharing Platform.

[Ben Watson (Ensemble Collaboration)]

Fred,

I liked your post. I think a lot of this will be popping up in what the pundits are now calling Web 2.0.

I believe the elements of a successful user experience can now be created:
- effective content
- personalized collaboration
- workflow context.

As you allude to, in today's Internet there is:
- too much content (thus driving a demand for search engines)
- too many answers (lots of opinions etc but not personally identifiable and thus not easily trusted)
- a lack of context which drives relevancy.

I actually believe that web services can help solve all three issues (search engines like Google already being a web service) and I think the enterprise market will be the sweet spot more so than the consumer/individual market as companies struggle with these islands of knowledge (‘codified’ and ‘live’) and if they can mesh them together then they will be able to respond faster, more effectively and with more innovation.

We also need to look at this opportunity with a long term point of view - how well a solution can scale or evolve as it continues to get more usage. I believe that underlying the foundation of the Web 2.0 is an increasing realization that the ultimate network connection is to another human being and that web searches, pages, blog etc will finally act as doorways to the people you actually want to connect with.

[Robert Young]

Reading through this thread (along with many issues related to web 2.0), I can't help but reminisce about all the debates that raged on around object-oriented programming way back when (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming).

Not sure if that's good, or bad. But one thing I do know... the browser is not a replacement for the OS. And until the OS takes a quantum leap forward, I'm pretty certain that web services will hit some significant walls.

It seems to me that Jonathan Schwartz understands this better than anyone... and hopefully, he will lead Sun to the breakthrough we're all looking for.

[Frank Patrick]

In organizations, relevancy comes from clarity about system-level goals and the constraints limiting their attainment. Once those are understood, personal relevancy and flow are more easily attained in the work context.

[charlie crystle]

I agree with Robert Young. Not only does the browser not replace the operating system, it doesn't come close to replacing desktop application performance or user experience. Even with Ajax... backloading a ton of data slows down performance and responsiveness at the front and back end of a session (including whatever latency you have at any given time of the day). We're leaving Salesforce, by the way. Performance stinks so we're going with our homegrown in-house based on GiftWorks.

And yeah--a plug here: we're releasing our platform SDK in about 2 months. Rich client, hosted services, run ajax if you want, run native desktop apps, connect it all to the back end over the web or locally, script or compile. The problem with browser-as-app is performance; the browser takes up a ton of system resources without delivering the expected corresponding responsiveness and performance. Yet we have a ton of desktop power just sitting there, waiting to be used. I initially wanted to build a hosted app--we founded Chilisoft and love server development--but when it came down to it the hybrid approach gives you the power of the desktop and the utility of hosted apps and services.

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