Yesterday the founder of the leading semantic collaboration service Twine published his description of the evolution of the desktop beyond traditional boundaries. This post discusses some of the principal features of what some have coined the “Webtop”. The fundamental question is that as many applications are emerging for Web-hosted storage, both for individuals and enterprises, what will the desktop of the future look like, and which features will ensure its existence?

It is exactly due to this question that Spivack commented that this desktop has “yet to be invented”. One mayor feature which will underlie this desktop, whatever its form, is that the user will still have a personal workspace, but it will not live statically on one device. It will be available on any device the user connects to, being part of a mobile cloud. Alongside this characteristic, it is a natural evolution that the browser, rather than the traditional desktop, will become the central feature. If users ubiquitously log on to a number of devices during the day, the desktop will be literally launched from the browser, instead of the other way round.

There will be a focus on updating information instead of organizing it. Nowadays, the key to keeping informed is having timely access to information, rather than archiving it in directories. This trend is reflected in social news sites and RSS feeds. This will be accompanied by users being in control of which information they absorb, as this capacity is finite. The user must decide what to pay attention to and what trends to follow; effectively, the mindset of a day trader.

Another pattern which has previously been pointed out by Tim Berners-Lee is that of “collective intelligence”, the future desktop will be characterized by a social aspect, being part of a social community which aids information management. Semantic, structured search being provided by the new desktop will also help the user in managing information. The social dimension of the desktop introduces many other useful features, such as social search, for example, according to document rankings assigned by members in a user’s network. Interactive shared spaces will replace folders, where many contributors can work collectively on one problem. The future desktop will be portable, being characterized by open-standard data formats. This will need to be accompanied by a model for policies and permissions regarding data, in order to avoid privacy concerns and stimulate mass adoption.  

Not only will the future desktop be online, attention-focused, social, portable, and have search capabilities, it will also be smart. The presence of the aforementioned features creates a desktop which is an intelligent system, relieving the user of information handling tasks. That means, adopting to the user’s personal preferences; interests, activities, work requirements, in a timely manner. It will be a personal cloud supported by distributed services, viewed as if they were all in the one space. That leaves only one question: who will be the first to propose a WebOS?

http://www.twine.com/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_desktop.php

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• Sir Berners-Lee’s Insights on the Future of the Semantic Web (0)

An important public symposium in the Semantic Web field was held last week in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, US), as part of the launch of a new research institute for Web Science, entitled Tetherless World Research Constellation. A number of leading figures such as Nova Spivack and Nigel Shadbolt were present, among those Tim Berners-Lee. The principal focus of Berners-Lee’s keynote speech was his future vision of the Web, for which he discussed a number of distinct aspects. Berners-Lee has never faltered to advocate his future Web vision as a semantic and social one. The formal scientific analysis of such outlooks has emerged as the field of Web Science, to which the new research centre is dedicated. The characteristics of the evolving Web which Berners-Lee outlined could be divided into various areas. One of the topics, which was also one of the general themes of the day, was the construction of more intelligent data, as opposed to smarter software. This is one of the objectives of the Semantic Web, which was introduced by Berners-Lee, however, adding that the conceptual links between data have the power to be used in unpredictable and novel ways. It has not yet emerged what the outcome of such opportunities will be, but the evolution of the Web is likely to have an impact on the traditional methods of constructing social systems. This was another one of the topics elaborated by Berners-Lee and other attendees.

The Web has spawned new social systems which have initiated new possibilities for viewing science and other political systems such as democracy. It is evident that with the advent of the Social Web, that networks can influence collective thinking, ideas or movements, which may be constructive but also destructive. The effect of such systems will be witnessed in the future.

 A further topic discussed was the requirement for existing technology to be able to cope with and complement the future form of the Web. If data and the concepts contained in data are interlinked, there arises a requirement for technologies to adapt to this data through more pages, higher bandwidth, and mobile devices. The filtration of the Web into daily life is an ongoing theme, which has previously been discussed by many of the leading researchers in the Semantic Web domain, which advocate and emphasize the role of the mobile Web. For example, the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker. 

 http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/06/11/ap5106902.html

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2319807,00.asp

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