Sunday, May 04, 2008

Web in 2013

The future of web is certainly going to be mobile. Advances in mobile devices is going to shape the future web applications. Google has already shown that Information is the most important resource any company should have. Information combined with mobility would give rise to the paradigm of "Information follows the user". By 2013, wearable computers would begin to make impact on the computer industry. This would call for more and more creativity and innovation among application developers rather than just logic or knowledge. Heres a video for example .



One application that is going to grow is social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Orkut. These sites have tremendous potential to grow in Asian countries like India and China. Every day in the morning I check my email accounts - google, yahoo, umbc [ in order of priority :) ] and then my Orkut account. I wont be surprised that by 2013 I would be checking my Orkut account first.

I dont think semantic web in its current form which is too demanding is going to be accepted. Thinking from a user perspective I dont see any strong use case for it to exist. The wine selection example which we saw in the class didn't impress me much. I would rather select wine from the menu card of restaurant rather than query the web. Yes but we need means to share, integrate, resuse data across applications and semantic web or similar technologies can be helpful only if they blend with the existing web. Semantic web in its improved form will take some time to annotate the world's information.


Looking at the rate which blogging is catching on the younger generation, I think every person would have an indentity/personality on web. With more an more user content being generated, privacy and security is going to be a great concern.


By 2013, web would be more personalized. Capturing more personal information about your users, knowing their preferences is a key area to concentrate on. Keeping users engaged in order to learn more about what each user wants, giving him everything at one website so that he does not have to leave the site and customizing the web for users seems to be good strategy.

For example,Project Joey, allows you to customize your mobile web experience by bringing the Web content you need most to your mobile phone.




I also feel the way in which web pages are rendered would undergo a dramatic change. More 3D animation with smooth surfaces would come to exist. In 2013, browsing the web would be a completely different experience with very less use of keyboard as we saw in the video. Voice recognition is certainly going to catch on, for sure. For example you can search in Google by just speaking rather than typing. Heres a similar example of Voice Web Search:




With so much of web around, there would be groups of people who would get frustrated and form communities like "We hate computers" but they would have to form such communities online! In short, you cannot escape web.

No comments: