The Future is Now: Internet Navigation and Browsing Gets a Facelift

As readers of my column in this blog are probably already acutely aware I love picking up bits and pieces of knowledge from ‘The Economist’ magazine. Well this post is no different. In the June 7th – 13th, 2008 issue there is an article entitled ‘Rummaging through the Internet’ that discusses new techniques of navigating the web and gathering information online. The article was fascinating to me as an IT professional and instructional designer.

One new piece of software is particulary enticing. It’s a project called Hyperwords and is being developed by a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland. Hyperwords, once installed, turns every word on every web page into a link and furthermore gives you menus and submenus for what you want to do with that link. In essence it makes the curious more easily able to satisfy their curiousity about the things they see and read online (they dont have to open another tab and browse to google and google it anymore).

Another interesting technology called Previews allows you hover your mouse over a link and see a popup window that shows a preview of the web page the link links to.  Another app from Cooliris, PicLens allows you to fetch images from flickr, videos from youtube, etc. and paste them up on a full-screen, 3-d wall that allows you to quickly navigate among the various elements and make decisions faster.

But those aren’t the only tools worth looking at. A new 3-D browser called E15 uses a special mouse to let users move around in 3-D space. Second Life is introducing a new feature that allows users to put web pages up on walls where users can view them together and talk about them together. Another browser 3B intends to make browsing the web itself social. Even Microsoft is getting in on the action with a new 3-D browser called Deepfish for mobile devices.