What I Want From The Next Generation of the Web

A lot to take in there, but I thought I'd quickly comment to point out my answers to your three questions:

1. No change on net.
2. Increased.
3. Increased.

The interesting difference is with #3. I wonder why this is. I'm a few years younger than you (five years ago, I wasn't married and my life was generally quite different), and I suspect that that is part of it.

Whether it's a case of being with the one you love or lovng the one your with, most of the people I care about are on IM most of the time (not all of them, but still).

I suspect that if you mapped answers to number #3 as a percentage change against the age of the person answering, you'd be looking at a flat 'U' shape: for many kids, and many older people the answer would be a big yes.

"Enabling interpersonal relationships on a local basis. Ebay let me buy a DVD from someone in Florida. The next generation should allow me to borrow the DVD from my neighbor. It is great to participate with a worldwide community of interest, but it is even better to participate with a local one."

As in Meetup.com meets Moogul?

For "So what do I hope for from Web 2.0? What do I want to invest in? Technology that actually reduces the technology footprint in my life. Applications that result in a net increase in productivity. And most importantly, technology that enables me to strengthen interpersonal and family relationships. That technology needs to be very easy to use and easy to integrate into my life. One leading candidate, my Nokia 6230 cell phone (even though I had to hack it. Makes me almost want to be a hardware investor :)" surprised that "hope for" and "invest in" would be so close!

On the pop quiz, 1., increased, 2., increased, 3., no change.

For 1., just the Internet with Google lets me find important information much faster. For 2., my cooking is much better from information on the Internet.

Broadly for 'technology' in my daily life, I just use my PC. So, I don't bother with a cell phone (works poorly in my area anyway), a Blackberry, etc. I don't carry anything electronic on my person. The only thing electronic in my attache case is my old HP-45. So, really, I don't regard technology as being intrusive on my life; correspondingly, I don't ask for technology to have a smaller "footprint" or that "technology needs to be very easy to use and easy to integrate into my life".

For "And most importantly, technology that enables me to strengthen interpersonal and family relationships.", I would guess that the keys here would be mostly just the desire and opportunity to strengthen the relationships and not what role technology could play.

I believe that e-mail is terrific, but it remains that my best writing and best presentation of ideas are on paper, not via e-mail. I can't really send my paper writing via e-mail because the word whacking I use is D. Knuth's TeX, and few others have TeX software to read what I would send.

Broadly, I see a lot of value in technology today and much more in the future but also see a lot of fluff. For thinking about what will be important in the future, we should identify and set aside the fluff.

For "Applications that result in a net increase in productivity.", I believe that that is just where the focus should be -- and also the main organizing concept, the main driver. Or, nearly all the world already knows what nearly all the world wants in the famous one word answer "More.". "The question everyone is asking" is: "How?".

Broadly the answer is to have computers do as much as possible of all the work there is to be done.

Currently we have computers too often being intermediaries between humans: A human types into a computer that communicates what was typed to some other computers and finally a computer displays the text and a human reads it, and I am being general here and not referring just to e-mail.

Instead, easily enough we can guess what we will move to: People managing computers managing computers, ..., several levels deep, managing computers doing the work, and nearly all the communications and nearly all the work in progress is computer to computer. Humans will be as far from the nuts and bolts of the work as the CEO of GM is now.

For this, we need better facilities for computers to work with computers. First, we need to enable computers to play vertically in that management hierarchy. Second, we need for computers to work better with other computers, both on information and also on physical work in progress. In particular, for the physical work in progress we should not be struggling to have computers function just the way humans do -- same audible sounds, same speech recognition, same visual abilities, same manual dexterity, etc. -- but should design the physical pieces to be manipulated well by what computers can do easily. In particular, I believe that current computer to human interfaces are fine (and I concentrate on text and try to avoid the Xerox PARC GUI themes) and that we should concentrate on computer to computer interfaces.

For computers, we need to regard them as crucial parts of the 'systems' we need for "more". That is, we need means to build 'systems', and we need better means for computers to play their role. For building systems, in many ways, computers are the brilliant underachievers far in the back of the class: For everything else we work with -- bricks, angle iron, dry wall, universal joints, I-beams, concrete, float glass, electric motors, PVC pipe, 2 x 4s -- we have enough understanding to do our design work reliably. For computers, we have nothing sufficiently similar; that is, we do not have components that we can use nearly effectively enough in engineering our systems.

Currently what we have in computers, I/O hardware, software is far too close conceptually to the basic bits and bytes. Instead, we need to go from the top down and ask what we want, what WE want, from computer-based 'components' to let us engineer and build with them more effectively. That is, we need to CREATE what we mean by the components we desire. We should create what we want; the bits and bytes will quite likely be sufficient to support what we want. In particular, we will want these components to have properties of being 'tangible'. And, their other properties will be observable. Etc.

We can compare: A carpenter can come to an old house, look at what needs repair, and proceed reliably. He doesn't need detailed design documents on the house; he can just see plenty well enough. Similarly for a plumber, an auto mechanic, etc. But, in software? Without detailed documentation, that typically takes much more effort to prepare than the software itself, we are lost. A common reaction is just to start over. For a wide variety of reasons, we have to get away from such computer nonsense.

There is another aspect to building computer-based systems: Somehow the actual design needs to be good. It is not enough just to say that it is a 'software' problem. Instead, software is just the implementation of design ideas that precede it. For these design ideas, we are deciding how to solve the problem in general terms. So, we are working abstractly, not manually one piece part at a time. Well, the most powerful tool we have for working abstractly is mathematics. It is inevitable, then, that as we make progress we will be doing more of our design work making much more use of mathematics. In particular, in the 21st Century, 'information technology' should be mostly about mathematics, mostly some rather advanced and abstract mathematics. In this, we will discover that the NP-complete problems are as important for the future of information technology as DNA is for biology. We will discover that ASAP decision making is tied closely to being 'adapted to a current of sigma-algebras'. For people in the NW, we will discover the importance of R. Rockafellar's scenario aggregation. Etc.

Sitting on the other end of the globe in a not as developed as US country, I am of the opinion that all the new advents in technology have only led to us spending more time with them, rather than helping us improve our relationships with
our near and dear ones.

Let me illustrate ATMs and Cellphones have done to my life.

Since my childhood, when I started going to banks with my parents, we used to have a one on one relationship with the bankers, tellers, managers...we used to go to the bank approx once or twice a month and still feel free to chat 9 to the dozen with the bankers...it was
a nice feeling. ATM's were supposed to reduce our
trips to the bank...Now I end up going to an ATM once every week ...and two weeks back I misplaced my ATM card....don't even ask me abt the grief that I had to undergo to get it replaced....the only folks that we have access to in the bank is the guys in the back office.

The Cellphone - I feel like throwing it into the bin when it rings at most inappropriate times. I can understand if there are urgent calls that need to be attended to...but given the lax laws we have in our country dealing with SPAM...I find that 60% of my incoming calls in a day are related to someone selling me either creditcards or loans or whatnots!!!!

And the less said about the email the better.....

Looking forward to your next post

Regards,
Raj

I'm skipping Web2.0 & going straight to 3.0

In this version we beat Amazon's A9 semantic-wannabe search engine, feedaggregators(not readers) become the new google, & millions of bookstores kill Amazon. Oh, and it's inevitable.

http://DataLibre.com

One step we are making is with the cell phone. In Asia and Europe there are dating networks which connect people if they are in physical proximity. Obviously this could be extended to a much wider variety of contacts so things like a couple might meet a possibly compatible couple for dinner. A lot of it is changing inhibitions, but this is shifting dramatically among many of the very young.

More sophisticated scheduling, from alerts that friends are in the vicinity to laying out weights for various meetings and having them scheduled automaticall are theoretically possible.

Economically the possibilities are revolutionary. I can imagine a day when you order a product from a local store, the manager sets out a message of when and where you want it delivered with a huge percentage of the ppoulation willing to make a bck or 2 picking it up. Ditto for car pooling and taxi service. With a decent system of vetting and a fair percentage of the population willing to participate we are talking about the same work done with a significant decline in vehicle miles. Makes things like travel to San Francisco easier.

The thing is that many of us would be willing to pick p or ride with strangers if there was verification and reputation systems. At any one time there are a huge number of people in our proximity going roughly where we want to go.

Technology can start linking this social possibility into a network. Our cell phones are the communicator as used by Captain Kirk, but already more sophisticated. The logical developments are more communal. Need someone to watch your kid? A mom and dad 2 blocks down is availible for 3 hours, good reputation including 2 recommendations from people you know and 5 from people who people you know say are reliable.

There are issues of privacy and the revolutionary replacement of a great deal of organization and bureaucracy, but it does have potential for interesting fleshly meeting.

What happened to the promise of Web 3.0? It’s been 6 years since the prediction of the Semantic Web evolution, with RDF, OWL, SPARQL, RIF, metawebs, and ontologies. It’s a deep mess. You have to be either crazy or a genius to figure that stuff out. Another faction has Web 3.0 pegged as becoming a service, somehow transforming unstructured information into structured information. Somehow, if machines talk to each other more effectively, people can access the right information quicker. That’s wishful thinking.

Why will this grand vision of Web 3.0 involving intelligent machines never happen? Because humans will never be surpassed by machines in judgemental intelligence. To be interested in certain things, that is a uniquely human trait. To belong to groups, another human trait. Because a machine-generated solution, regardless of how advanced, cannot replace humans. In the end, only humans can help other humans.

What’s Next?

We’re ready for the next generation of the web, the real Web 3.0. We have everything we need to create that vision. Let me describe that vision.

Different words have different meaning to different people. Different people are identified by different demographics. There’s no need for the machine to understand all that meaning stuff. As long as people understand, and communicate with the smallest possible unit of related meaning. Which is the question and answer.

By simply matching questions with other similar questions, and group the answers from all the experts, users are given access to the best possible knowledge available from all perspectives. So you can learn at a much faster rate, bypassing the uninteresting noise for the interesting nuggets of knowledge.

Are You Ready?

* If you would benefit with more accurate search by providing accurate demographics, wouldn’t you?
* If you would benefit with more accurate search by asking what you’re interested in, wouldn’t you?
* If you would benefit with more accurate search by answering what you know, wouldn’t you?
* If you would benefit with more accurate search by rating what you like, wouldn’t you?

The next generation of the web will make use of what we like, what we know, and what we’ve done, to give us what we need. Based on our recent search history. Based on our demographics. Based on our ratings, questions and answers.

Given your usage, the system should know what you’re interested in, and can show you questions based on the community you naturally belong to. So you will not have to avoid people you find annoying… the system will segregate you naturally. Also, other people similar to you will, through their ratings, constantly be finding things that are interesting to you. This system is adaptive, so that as your interests change, your search results change with you.

The good news is Web 3.0 is here. And it’s simpler than anybody have thought.

The bad news? It’s just not what anyone expected.

The remaining question? Who’s going to build this first.

Try http://www.helpglobe.com.You'll see what I mean.