This is a first post of notes from this year’s Web 2.0 conference. I only attended a handful of sessions, but I cherry-picked sessions relevant to my work at Instructables and a couple ones of personal interest.

Session Title
Order from Chaos: The Future of the Web

Presenter
Aza Raskin

Raskin’s talk was on — well, not quite the future of the web — but rather the future of web clients. He had a slew of interesting ideas and demos of experiments that Mozilla Labs is doing to update the things our software agents do for us. He also had many thoughts on the nature of browser competition.

I’ve edited my notes down substantially. You can read the key points after the jump.

The Advantage of being Mozilla

Mozilla Labs (ML) is a shared space for democratizing massive-scaled innovation. Innovation from the edges. Raskin gives a weird example: McDonald’s breakfast came from one rebellious franchise.) Unlike McDonald’s, however, ML innovation network is a hybrid company and volunteer network. Here’s how the pyramid breaks down:

• ~100 employees
• ~1000 code contributors
• ~10000 testers
• ~1000000 users (more like 300m)

40% of code comes from outside the Mozilla Corporation.

ML can’t match Google or Microsoft in creating a hundreds-of-people Labs division. But it can harness the creativity of tens of thousands of people, bringing in innovation from the edges. That’s what he means by order from chaos (Raskin called ordered chaos “Chaordic.”)

Raskin’s belief is that chaordic networks are strongest in creation and innovation. Push liabilities all to the edges, bring successes to the center. It’s a form of leverage not as available to the Googles and Microsofts of the world.

This is true of the development of the code behind Mozilla products, but has been less true on the design side. ML is now working on chaordic design as well. [I've noticed this with lots of theme and UI competitions at Labs. Wordpress is doing similar stuff.]

“Chaord” causes disruptive innovation that order cannot. Example given of the iterative design cycle used to create the Xbox game controller (images given the incremental evolution of the the game controller.) The Wiimote is then given as an example of a disruptive innovation.

[I didn't see this as a Chaordic one, though, since Nintendo seems like another large corporation, not a distributed R+D aggregator, and challenged Aza. He gave a Miyamoto example in return; something about drawing in patterns from other disciplines and having to hide his hobbies for trade secret reasons. I'll have to look that one up.]

People-Centric Interactions

Exercise: Aza asked someone in the audience to talk about his significant other for thirty seconds without giving away gender. This seemed difficult to do, though the volunteer succeeded in keeping the gender obscured, which Aza said was rare. Point: Humans have built-in representations of one another that software has largely ignored.

Adding human-centered features can be a challenge. Design and security are at odds. New features are often new vectors for attack (example of flash video pop-under that succeeded in tricking Mozilla internal security team; audio and video streams harvested for the whole day!)

Is it a tradeoff, though? Technology problems are often solved by non-techies (i.e. most people) as relationship problems. What computer should I buy? Ask your nephew. How can these patterns be extended to the web? Can they both add features and increase security?

Example of QQ, which is an IM client with a browser embedded inside. People chat, view things together. It grew insanely, esp in China. Why? QQ is people (IM) with the web tacked on. The traditional browser, OTOH is the web with people tacked on. The traditional browser has it backwards.

ML is working on projects (Ubiquity) which redefine the browser and the web so that people come back to the center of web interactions.

In response to quesiton: Raskin believes that a lot of these walled-garden platforms like Facebook and Twitter will become lower-level, protocol-like. We saw the save evolution occur with the web itself (AOL as walled garden.) He expects the same evolution to occur with social networks.

Interaction Demos

Ambient/No Cost interfaces

Shows mockup of New Tab interface, showing quick jumps to often-used resources, predating what Safari and Chrome now have.* This polished UI is coming in FF 3.5. Address detection example. Ample opportunity for third-party “detectors.” The browser becomes your personal agent, ambiently.

Real and Continuous

ML Weave. Seamless movement between computer and mobile device. Start a reservation on your laptop, walk out the door; it’s already sitting there on your phone.

Right now, the web is fundamentally broken. Whenever you see a website asking for your Gmail username/password. Contacts aren’t portable, yet. [See upcoming notes on how bad this interaction pattern is. Some call it an interaction anti-pattern.]

Tabs 2.0. These were great, but they don’t scale. Adaptive path has great concepts of how to move forward. Another example: scroll tabs.

Functionality without borders

Putting all the services at your fingertips, make everything available at all times: Ubiquity. If hospitals worked the way the web does right now, all of our patients would be dead. We’d have to wheel them to a different room every time we wanted to use an implement on them. Web tools should be available to us wherever and whatever we’re working on, not the other way around.

Demo, here, similar to what you can find on the web. Live, continuous, personal mashups of data from online services to accomplish everyday tasks quickly.

The command editor is the cool part here. Raskin demos the creation of a hello world demo Ubiquity command, showing how easy it is. These ten/twenty line scripts can be imported from other sites. Bookmarklets on steroids. [Massive potential for innovation at the edges, as described above. A new platform, like add-ons before.]

Interesting exchange on natural language. Questioner wonders if computers are ready to be taking NL queries like this. Raskin responds that it’s not just about computers figuring out what you mean. In real human interactions, there’s a conversation. People ask for clarification, read gestural and bodily cues, infer context. They figure out meaning together. This is an approach that we should embrace with computer UIs. Embrace ambiguity. When the user starts typing, provide options. Learn from choices, filter using contextual data.

• Note: this is not the Web Wars 2.0. The browser makers all get together and discuss features. It’s competition, but not in making a standards set dominant, but rather to make the best product that still interoperates.

Related Posts:

• Blizzard Breaks and Enters Onto Customer Private Property (October, 2005)
• Web 2.0 Notes: Rapid Prototyping Using Flash (April, 2009)
• Weekly Digest for October 28th (October, 2009)
• Weekly Digest for October 14th (October, 2009)
• “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy” (November, 2008)

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