The Web Will Disappear (in About 18 Months)
Back in 2005, Mike asked me (probably for a pitch) where I thought the web was going in the next 2-5 years. I made two predictions: first, that the “web” would disappear; that is, it would become ubiquitous, like electricity. Second, that it wouldn’t improve much in terms of usability, because publishing and development tools were getting easier and easier to use, which meant that more and more people would be producing more and more garbage.
This was at a time when social networking was dominated by Friendster; Facebook and Twitter were barely concepts; and the iPhone 3G was still about 2 years away.
On the first point, I think I’ll turn out to be mostly right. The U.S. is really the last industrialized country to get high-speed, ubiquitous mobile data access, and most major cities are covered (and I venture to guess that WiMax will hit the rest of the country within the next year and a half.) With newspapers in decline and some form of electronic paper reader on the rise (I honestly don’t think it’ll be the Kindle DX; I’m waiting for something flexible), plus devices like the Hub and G1, we really aren’t that far from having the web embedded in everything, everywere, all the time. (In 2005, it seemed a lot further away.)
On the usability front, I think the jury is still out. Many tools (like Tumblr, and TypePad) make publishing content easier to do well, which means greater UI consistency across sites. Unfortunately, the Top 10 Usability Issues still haven’t changed, and so far there are no good tools for helping people produce better, more worthwhile content.
This is part of what makes Twitter so difficult to get a handle on; it’s astonishing ease of use makes it easy to fill with content, but terribly difficult to extract anything useful out of. Once again, search will be the killer app here.
2 years ago • Notes