Web 2.0 Experience Continuum

Read this lovely article by Dan Saffer in Adaptive Path, where he quotes William Gibson "The future is here. It's just unevenly distributed.” He says: “Over the next ten years, we’ll see a wide range of experiences online, from highly structured to nearly formless… So what will the next ten years feel like? Disorienting at first, but normal eventually. It will take time for users to acclimate to the semi-structured experiences available on the Web, and even longer to accept the unstructured experiences. We’ll shed some of the metaphors — sites, bookmarks, pages, and so on — that we’ve used to orient ourselves on the Web, in the same way that cars stopped having running boards and television has stopped broadcasting stage plays.” Talking of the Web 2.0 Experience Continuum, he notes: “On the conservative side of this experience continuum, we’ll still have familiar Websites, like blogs, homepages, marketing and communication sites, the big content providers (in one form or another), search engines, and so on. These are structured experiences. Their form and content are determined mainly by their designers and creators. In the middle of the continuum, we’ll have rich, desktop-like applications that have migrated to the Web…These will be traditional desktop applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and email. But the more interesting will be Internet-native, those built to take advantage of the strengths of the Internet: collective actions and data (e.g. Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought…”), social communities across wide distances (Yahoo Groups), aggregation of many sources of data, near real-time access to timely data (stock quotes, news), and easy publishing of content from one to many (blogs, Flickr). The experiences here in the middle of the continuum are semi-structured in that they specify the types of experiences you can have with them, but users supply the content (such as it is). On the far side of the continuum are the unstructured experiences: a glut of new services, many of which won’t have Websites to visit at all. We’ll see loose collections of application parts, content, and data that don’t exist anywhere really, yet can be located, used, reused, fixed, and remixed. The content you’ll search for and use might reside on an individual computer, a mobile phone, even traffic sensors along a remote highway. But you probably won’t need to know where these loose bits live; your tools will know. These unstructured bits won’t be useful without the tools and the knowledge necessary to make sense of them, sort of how an HTML file doesn’t make much sense without a browser to view it. Indeed, many of them will be inaccessible or hidden if you don’t have the right tools.”