XplanaZine

Ok, it’s personal confession time. I don’t have much of a sense of direction. That goes for places I’ve never been to and the ones I’ve been in all my life. Heck, several years ago, I took some of my co-workers down to Austin, where I grew up, and they were amazed that I got dreadfully lost one night. “It’s dark,” I told them. “I’m used to navigating by landmarks and I can’t see a thing at night.”

I’ll readily admit, I’m the man women make fun of when they talk about guys who would rather wander around aimlessly forever rather than ask someone for directions. What the women in my life don’t understand, however, is that I don’t ask questions not because I’m afraid of being wrong, but rather because I like the discovery that only comes from wandering.

Yes, it’s true, sometimes the task or goal at hand has tight time constraints and wandering aimlessly just won’t work. But, for the most part, I’ve always arrived on time, kept my projects on task, and still managed to discover a whole range of new things along the way.

I like to call my method of maneuvering “organic.” I have a starting point and an end point but no set path in between. It lets me get the most out of everything I do.

Now, I am aware that a good percentage of people do not move about this way. They operate in a more linear fashion and get nervous when people like me get too close to them. They like direct paths and known routes. Discovery, for them, is the same as chaos.

In essence, this is the dilemma of the browser. It was built originally for a world moving about in a linear fashion and for a Web structure that assumed direct routes from points A to B. When newer browsers started to appear with features like tabbed browsing, it was nice for all us organic surfers but it didn’t seem absolutely essential. There was tension between linear and organic but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t live with.

And then along came Web 2.0. All of a sudden organic has become the new way of life. Every new application is about discovery. Everything is about allowing users to create their own personal experience, about moving about and finding information exactly the way they want it. Yes, you can still do old school, linear travel, but it’s no longer the default.

With this shift, the traditional browser, the model of lowest-common-denominator viewing, is hard pressed to keep up. We embed rich Internet applications, spruce them up with a bit of AJAX, and make new plug-ins available as fast as we can. But, in the end, we realize that the issue is not one of technology but rather one of vision. We want our browsers to be more useful, more customizable, and more invisible at the same time.

What we want, and what we are moving towards, is an experiential browser. It will function more like a customizable home (or whatever else you want it to look like) and it will have traditional browser functionality as well as game qualities. As we can do with games, we’ll be able to collect things, compare ourselves to others (points and rankings), get feedback on our actions, interact with others, and personalize our environment. As we can currently do with browsers like Firefox, we’ll also be able to set auto-destinations, keep track of where we’ve been, pull in information from other areas, and personalize our look and feel. As we can do with games, we’ll be able to collect “valuable” items and share them with others, earn points for our participation in the community, have full two-way communication with others, and have completely unique look and functionality settings. This new browser will be avatar driven (for those who want to play that way), provide public and private areas of movement, and present a full economy of rewards for our actions.

The future browser will be experiential, a mix between Firefox 2.0 and Hive7. We can see this coming easily enough. The real question is whether or not we can expand our educational content visions to adapt to this new experiential reality.

It looks awfully exciting to me.

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