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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