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I’ve been working on a new research concept and prototype that will illustrate some future directions of search engines. New emerging technologies like the semantic web, RDF, the mobile web, and social media may open up unprecedented opportunities for controlling the ebb and flow of information. This control will be enhanced and increased as more powerful UI platforms like Adobe Flex and MS SilverLight continue to evolve. Accessing the WWW may become more akin to operating a customized application GUI than the linear browsing behavior we see today.

Key issues:

• So what will this new search/information retrieval look like?
• How will our web browsing experience change?
• How can users design a search experience? What types of tools and UIs will they need to manipulate and customize their information?

These are questions I’ll be addressing with the team at RDVO. More coming soon, and any interesting ideas or links would be helpful!

I’ve been doing some research on Web 3.0 and semantic search. There are a lot of exciting and groundbreaking new technologies emerging that could reinvent the Internet. It will become increasingly important for web marketers and digital strategists to stay on top of these advances—there are numerous communications and marketing applications.

One of these new technologies is the Friend of a Friend project, or FOAF. FOAF is an XML-based method for organization and cataloging the relationships between people’s profiles. By understanding the relationships between people, data, and relationships, FOAF attempts to build a uniform method for sharing the types of information users store on social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In fact, a great example of FOAF-like technologies is the “People You May Know” feature on Facebook.

The real promise of FOAF is to create a new data model that will suggest connections between people and—more interestingly—people and information.

Just imagine the value this type of data and intelligence could have to marketers and advertisers. Online ad targeting hasn’t evolved much in the last five years. Protocols like FOAF may be the catalyst to take online advertising to the next level. Imagine being able to target a campaign based on psychographics. Understanding how your target market operates on the web is one thing that FOAF can help to define.

Clearly there are issues with the technologies. Not only has adoption been slow and held back by the confusion and inherent geekiness that’s held back the growth of the semantic web. There are also many issues about security and data protection. Regardless, these technologies are on the move and it won’t be long until the possibilities seen with FOAF (and similar protocols like XFN and SIOC) are realized.

Anyone can create a FOAF profile. You can use a this wizard to create the file and upload it to your website.

There’s an interesting presentation from Mule Design on how a designer’s approach and strategy for copy can make or break a digital interface.

For a lot of projects, copy and wording are considered “icing” or an element of the design process that gets fitted in later—often with little or no involvement from designers. While many user interface experts believe that digital interfaces cannot support copious amounts of copy (the concept that users scan rather than read), the trend in UI design is more copy, not less. Wikipedia and Facebook are both great examples of how text can be used as the core of the user experience.

The presentation also discusses new communication and expression trends that are evolving as aspects of Web 2.0 – the concept that “We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text.”

The presentation, Copy as Interface, is embedded below.

Nexus is neat Facebook application that lets you visualize connections between all of your friends. It’s a fascinating way to examine how your friends fall into clusters and interrelate. My clusters clearly correlate with phases of my life stretching all the way back to elementary school. Cool stuff.

It’s also interesting to see which friends are the “focal” contacts who link across different groups and people. It’s too bad this tool isn’t available for LinkedIn or a different business site. It would be incredibly useful to see how business contacts and groups connect with each other.

Nexus is a product of Ludios Networks.

Cool visualization — shows how all the interstate highways are connected.