Almost every late-generation website has embraced the same recent interface (UI) trends, sporting slick AJAX- and DHTML-generated interfaces, and most offer their users community-driven features like user ratings and content-creation tools. Some, like Prosper, Youtube, Facebook, eBay and Wikipedia, have or will become bellwether sites as they discover novel ways to empower consumers.

Some may even participate in taking the web to the next plateau by breaking through the walls separating one site from another. For, as amazing as the web has been at linking people together to accomplish great (or at least impressive) things, it has mostly failed at creating communication links between websites, leaving the web ocean filled with myriad islands.

It is a logical progression. First portals and search engines revolutionized the web by their grand success in linking documents; then social networks altered the face of the Net by linking people. Now, new technologies promise a third revolution by forging new links between websites.

These technologies, as represented by projects like OpenId, the Data Portability Project, and Microformats, are devoted to standardizing and facilitating information exchange so data can be easily ported from site to site. Think, for example, at the personal level, of the convenience of creating or updating your profile across all your personal networking sites using a single form. This kind of data portability, plus a new, shared philosophy of openness among web players, is beginning to create these website linkages, leading to an almost perfect fluidity of data on the web.

Mashups are of course one of the first manifestations of this fluidity. Using the web as a platform, mashups leverage available APIs (application programming interfaces) to combine data from multiple sources to create new services on existing websites. Consider, for example, a site that combines mapping data from one site with yellow pages information from another to create a rich directory not available on either source site.

This trend toward open exchange will only accelerate. As a first consequence, computers will become true “digital assistants,” providing a web experience that will become more and more personalized for everyone (with everyone simultaneously becoming more and more tuned in to privacy concerns).

Following this line of thought, we can seek the next evolution in the next kind of link being built. It is in fact already being built around us. It is an even deeper link between people arising from the convergence of personal communication and Internet access devices. The mobile phone will soon serve as the primary way to be online, with any time/anywhere connectivity thanks to the persistence of wifi/wimax connections, allowing for a ubiquitous yet even more personalized and more useful experience.

The next step will be the link between web applications and real life objects, with more and more objects being connected to the Internet (think of cars with GPS systems and “smart” household appliances connected to the Internet for remote management). Simultaneously, connected devices will play an increasingly active role in data exchanges. Think, for example, of your mobile phone not just providing GPS data to a web application in order to direct you to a local restaurant, but also (knowing your music download history and the community forums to which you subscribe) communicating your love of music as part of your profile, with the result being you are automatically steered to a restaurant with a live pianist at lunch.

And following on the heels of links between web applications and real life objects will be links between the objects themselves. What happens when your mobile phone, your TV and your smart car get together (with each other and their peers) to talk about you? Who said scary?

Are you on Facebook? Do you compulsively
log on every day? At all hours? Is the site always open in your browser? Set as
your home page??

How can one explain the remarkable success
of this umpteenth social network? Is it timing? A masterful technical
deployment? Ease of use? The non-stop, abundant flow of info on even the
slightest movements among one’s entourage? Or simply luck? Could it have as
easily been any other of the hundreds (no, thousands) of sites vying for your
attention and that of your friends? Who knows? In any case, it’s a runaway success.

I’m only connected to a dozen or so
friends, but already on my home page I can follow a continual stream of newly
posted photos and images, track relationships in the making (or unmaking), view
profile updates, follow fluff messages or plug into useful exchanges, or join
improbable groups, like the “I flip my pillow over so I can feel the cold
side when I’m sleeping” group, or the ever-popular and grammatically
challenged “If the End of the World was announced by Melissa Theuriau, I’ll
die happy” group.

You can easily connect every half hour and
find new updates. With more friends, make that
every few minutes. It’s a little like gazing out a window and following the
action on a street where only your friends pass, an insider’s view into what
your friends think and feel, and what they want.

What’s more, there is a whole host of
plug-n-play applications you can add to your Facebook home page to move from
gazer to player (some developed by Facebook and other by partners). Say you
belong to the group “Brits in New York.” You could already exchange messages with
members of this group, but now you can plug in the Calendar app and organize a
meet-up with Newcastle fans at Nevada Smiths. Plug in the Slideshows app, and you can share videos of
your Newcastletonians Night Out. And not happy with your latest Profile pic?
Touch it up with the app Picnik. The possibilities are endless. Are you still
going to need your buggy old OS? You, yes. But your kids?

Now some of my professional contacts have
started to send me Facebook connection requests. All’s fine and well when the
network is confined to your web geek friends, but imagine what dilemmas await
as the networks spread. Do you really want to leave up that photo of you
rollerblading in the leopard thong?

With that cautionary anecdote noted, the
consent-based social networks of Facebook are considerable and seem useful for
all sorts of purposes:

• Small Ads: I could privilege ads coming from my close contacts, those whom I trust most, followed by those from members of my groups, etc. (This is also the approach used by Microsoft’s “Live Expo” in leveraging your MSN contacts.)
• Professional networking: I could explore jobs and partnerships and maintain client contacts. All that you can do on LinkedIn or Viadeo.
• Travel: I could better choose destinations, hotels, windsurfing
  spots, tour operators and airlines.
• News: I could more easily sift through the endless news stories available on the Net by filtering them for those read or recommended by my contacts, or maybe even just those contacts with whom I share particular interests.
• Dating: This is already in place and well-used, judging from the categories available for one’s Profile: “Single”, “In a Relationship”, “In an Open Relationship” (?!), “Engaged”, “Married”, or “It’s Complicated”; and those that describe what you’re looking for: “Friendship”, “A Relationship”, “Dating”, “Random Play”, or “Whatever I can get”.
• Net Searching: Will Google be rendered obsolete one day by a yet-to-be-invented “social search” application? An application that responds better to exploratory requests like “What are the best vegan restaurants in Queens?” or “What’s the best way to break up with my girlfriend?” Yahoo Answers and the now defunct Google Answers have tried to address this challenge, but a real community aspect is needed for this to truly work, and Facebook has the most well connected communities on the Net…

Certain oracles even see Facebook
dethroning Yahoo and Google altogether one day …And you? What’s your Facebook
prediction? A soft fading into the sunset as with Friendster? Why? Perhaps you
find terrifying the phenomenal quantity of information and photos available to
Facebook and all the partner applications for whatever purposes are deemed
useful…

Search engines are evolving very rapidly these days, and Google is certainly leading the race. But look closely at what Google has recently announced. The recent “Universal Search” initiative is very interesting in what it tells us about what Google is having a hard time doing, namely, having users take advantage of the many specialty search engines and services that they have to offer (image search, video search, book search, google scholar, etc.).

In more ways than one, what Google is trying to do is to introduce some form of serendipity between their specialty searches, so that people looking for something on the Web discover, for instance, that there are videos or books about that topic. This is the clearest indication that the very “linear” user experience that Google has imposed as a de-facto standard for search is about to reach a hard limit.

But as Exalead users know, Search By Serendipity (R) has been at the very heart of Exalead’s technology since day one : between different vertical search engines through the little “Exa mascott” that suggests audio or video results in the Web search, and in the more unique way within each vertical Exalead search application using a tag cloud of concepts to navigate in the search results (of our Wikipedia search for instance). It’s a better way to search that Exalead has developed and invested significant resources in to evolve.

We certainly find this process of searching by serendipity the most natural user experience for search, and we are very flattered to see the market leader validate that vision.

On a similar track, we are very pleased to see that Exalead’s latest innovations (image search with face recognition) has also been introduced (although still in a hidden form) a few days ago by Google. Maybe they had to release this ahead of schedule? Who knows…

Exalead has added a new function to your search refinement toolkit: the ability to narrow your results to just blogs or forums.

This new functionality will help you to:

• Obtain the very latest information,
• Find pertinent product information without getting lost in a sea of advertising and price comparison sites,
• Easily access the opinions of other consumers: What is the best digital camera on the market? Where is a good bargain hotel in London? What should you expect when you’re expecting twins??
• Discover new forums and blogs you may otherwise never have found, and much more.

Alternatively, you may choose to exclude blogs and forums from your search if these sites do not carry the type of information for which you are looking.

Bravo to our feedbackers for suggesting this feature, and to our Exalead engineers for developing the advanced classification algorithms capable of determining if a site is a blog or forum, of automatically refreshing blog and forum indexes, and of optimising the classification system to more
efficiently manage this new process.