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Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing 

Illustration by Belle Mellor

THE web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another.

But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink—not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things.

All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.

Hyperwords is a relatively new idea, and so far it has fewer than 200,000 users. But it is one of a number of new initiatives designed to transform internet browsing, by providing more connections between data, presenting information in new ways and making it easier to navigate. Another example is Cooliris, a start-up based in Silicon Valley, which has invented a browser add-on called Previews. Hovering the mouse pointer over a link causes a small preview of the linked page to pop up in a tiny window, making it easier to decide whether to click through to the page or not. More than 2m people have downloaded the free software since January.

Another Cooliris application, PicLens, takes images fetched from Google, Flickr, Facebook, eBay and other websites and displays them, free of the clutter on each image’s webpage, on a spectacular full-screen, 3-D wall. Viewers can zip left and right, zooming in or pulling back, to scan hundreds of images in seconds. Images can be clicked for full-screen display, or shown in context on their original webpage. The free software has been downloaded over 5m times. A new version, released in April, turns YouTube searches into a clutter-free wall of videos in a similar fashion. Austin Shoemaker, technology chief at Cooliris, says internet users are “subconsciously frustrated” with clicking “next, next, next” to view content.

PicLens provides a glimpse of a possible future for the web: as a three-dimensional environment, in which users move through clusters of pages that appear to float in space, pushing unwanted ones away and arranging others in logical groupings. This approach takes advantage of people’s natural spatial memory. John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, says people find it hard to navigate the flood of online information in two dimensions, and rarely open more than a few windows at a time. With a 3-D browser over 100 windows can be visible at once, even on a laptop screen.

Mr Maeda, until recently a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked on a forthcoming 3-D browser called E15 which uses a special mouse to allow viewers to move around in a 3-D space. Researchers have been kicking around 3-D browsers in labs for years, but they never came to much. Only in the past year or so have ultra-fast internet connections and powerful computers become commonplace enough to make mass-market 3-D browsing feasible.

SpaceTime, a start-up based in New York, has developed a 3-D browser which has been downloaded over 2m times since its launch in January. SpaceTime’s boss, Edward Bakhash, says the inspiration came from video games, and the sleek animated graphics of Apple’s iPhone. Software developers compete, of course, but Mr Bakhash says there is a feeling that the whole community is working hard to “help usher in the next paradigm”.

The movement will get a boost in late July, when Second Life, a popular 3-D virtual world, incorporates a feature that will allow inhabitants to post web pages on walls. Joe Miller, vice-president of technology at Linden Labs, the company in San Francisco, California, that runs Second Life, says 2-D web browsing is usually solitary. Browsing in Second Life, however, will be a social activity, because users strolling virtually through the world can gather and chat next to web pages.

A browser called 3B, developed by a firm of the same name in London, also makes browsing social. Users search for a product, and pictures of the results are arranged into the aisles of a virtual shop. Shoppers can mill about to get a better look, and chat via instant messaging with other people searching for similar things. Over 200 retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart and Gap, display their wares in 3B. A few employ shop-assistants to answer shoppers’ questions. 3B takes a cut of sales initiated in its browser. Nicky Morris, the firm’s boss, says business is “absolutely phenomenal” because women in particular stay in shops longer when they are not alone.

Microsoft is also developing a 3-D browser, called Deepfish, for mobile devices. Many other 3-D browsers are in the pipeline. It is seductive technology that can look gorgeous. But Dave Farber, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who is one of the internet’s founding fathers, says the enthusiasm for cool visuals will be replaced by a realisation that 3-D navigation is a much-needed tool. He points to Hyperwords, which he thinks will become widely used (and imitated). It allows people to make more connections of the kind that interest them. A user can add an option, say, to search for any clicked-on word or phrase in her favourite Bolivian and Peruvian newspapers. Hyperwords users can also effortlessly place clicked-on text into a blog, e-mail, instant message or Facebook profile. These new connections add “depth” to words and ideas, Mr Farber says, but create incredibly complex networks. Without 3-D maps, he says, we may lose our bearings. 

-Jun 5th 2008 

From The Economist print edition

Sometimes I think I live on mobile. If there’s a device I really couldn’t miss it’s my mobile phone. Ask my wife, if on occasion I don’t take my mobile phone with me, she’ll wonder how it’s possible I forgot it. It’s just too odd for me to be without. According to my mom, it’ll grow on my ears one day. Whatever

Anyway, it’s true that mobile is important for me, ever since I got my first mobile phone some 10 years ago. Every year I hope that mobile will really breakthrough, but unfortunately also this year won’t be the year of mobile, just like 2007, 2006 nor 2005 were the year of mobile. It’s that one prediction that I wish it were through, but you know it won’t be.

It’s not even in our hands. I think the devices are there, thinking of the N95, the iPhone and some Windows Mobile devices that are all capable of doing amazing things for such a small device. The iPhone has the interface to love, my HTC is less slick but comes with 3G, built in GPS and all the power of Office and Exchange on mobile. Or the N95 with it’s superb camera. And now I’m not mentioning a ton of other great features these phones have.

Apart from all that greatness, I’ve been a very active user of the mobile web for the last 6 years or so as well. First on WAP on my old Nokia 6310i for instance, later on Vodafone Live with a Sharp GX30. Back then I was still working on Kinepolis‘ new media strategy and we invested in this back then already. Today Kinepolis is still one of the very few Belgian companies with a decent mobile site, for which you got to give them credit. But even outside Belgium, there aren’t many mobile specific sites, which already resulted in a shout-out more than a year ago.

The mobile sites I currently use are: BBC, Bloglines, Gmail, Hotmail, Messenger, Dopplr, Facebook, Google Reader, Live Search, Kinepolis, MSN, Twitter, Technorati, Wapedia, Flickr, Yahoo and WordPress. I don’t really know many more that are of use to me, or that aren’t in a walled garden like Vodafone Live.

I also use client versions like Live Messenger (which you can download for all kinds of devices), the Live Search client as well as the Google Maps client, Yahoo!Go, … as well as apps that run in the Java environment on mobile like Gmail and Opera Mini. On the N95 I also tried the Widsets, but whatever the phone, the browse services still top them all.

Today, with the iPhone’s browsing capabilities, or other mobile browsers that enable better viewing of ‘normal websites’ on mobile we will probably skip the further development of mobile specific sites. With Skyfire for instance (see announcement) or Deepfish I expect to see more ‘regular’ browsing in the future.

Still, the problem remains, now even more than ever I guess. We will have access to every site we want, with great browsers but at what cost? There’s a good explanation why I use so much mobile: I can use it obviously but more important is that I don’t have to pay for it. The day I have to pay for it, I’ll cut back for sure, need or no need. How much I love the Wifi on these phones, that’s not truly mobile for me. It’s when in a taxi, or before checking in a plane, while waiting on someone, … that I love to use all my catching up. Not only in my sofa at home for instance.

So unless operators change their models on data costs, mobile will never really breakthrough and that’s sad. And yes you can discuss devices etc aren’t ready yet either, allow me to say they’re well ahead of the game when you compare them to operator attitudes. And I’m afraid they won’t change that soon either. There’s too much money to be made with TXT messages to allow you to use IM on mobile instead for instance. What’s your take?

PS: Also check out the upcoming FF for Mobile now we’re at it

PPS: And Twitter, for god’s sake, at least add a replies tab to m.twitter.com will ya!

Wie immer wenn amerikanische IT Firmen ein wenig hinter der modernsten Technologie z.B. beim Browser für Handies hinterher sind wird zunächst viel heiße Marktingluft erzeugt. Microsoft’s Luftschloss heißt Deepfish und Google arbeitet an einem Transcoder basierenden Google Mobile Browser ähnlich dem Opera Mini. Die kritische Komponente ist der Transcoder, der die Webseiten so umformt, dass sie auf den kleineren Bildschirmen der mobilen Geräte dargestellt werden können und auch die Datenmenge beim Preview (Übersicht) auf etwa 10 kByte reduziert wird. Man kann sich auf dem PC ansehen wie eine Seite umgeformt wird wenn man der Seite die Adresse des Transcoder Proxies voranstellt. Die transcodierte Seite dieses Blogs hat dann die Adresse  http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://portaleco.wordpress.com Sieht man sich diese transcodiert Seite aber auf dem Handy an und vergleicht das mit der Darstellung von Opera Mini, dann sieht man den Technologie Vorsprung den Opera gegenüber Google hat. Opera Mini kann auch komplexe Microsoft Sharepoint Seiten darstellen während der Google Transcoder z.B. bei der Sharepoint Seite http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.portaleco.eu/evaluation sofort aussteigt. Bei Opera gibt es zwar auch noch viele Probleme mit komplexen Webseiten – die Entwickler aus Norwegen haben aber bereits viele Probleme gelöst, die die Entwickler von Google wahrscheinlich noch nicht einmal kennen. Leider ist wohl abzusehen wie die Geschichte ausgehen wird. Google wird wohl Opera aufkaufen und damit die Technologie nach USA transferieren. Das Transcoding Konzept von Opera passt hervorragend in das Business Modell von Google, da bei weltweitem Einsatz der Transcoding Technologie riesige Server Parks ähnlich wie bei der Suche benötigt werden.

Die Transcoding Technologie ist grundsätzlich begrenzt wenn komplexere Interaktionen und Eingabemethoden auf mobilen Geräten benötigt werden. Im Rahmen eines EU Projekts hat ein Consortium mit IBM (Entwicklungslabor Böblingen), NOKIA, SAP  u.a. einen intelligenten Ansatz  (Consensus) gemacht, der auch mit einem Transcoding Ansatz kombiniert werden könnte. Leider ist dieser Vorschlag mangels Risikoträgern für die Umsetzung genauso in der Versenkung verschwunden wie so manch anderes vielversprechendes EU Projekt. Forschung ohne Umsetzung im Markt ist eben nur begrenzt wirksam.  

So it would seem… It appears that Deepfish, Microsoft Live Labs answer to the iPhone’s full featured browser, is no longer available for download and no longer accepting beta registrations. Given the buggy nature of the latest releases, it bodes poorly, but who know, maybe they’re getting ready for a full release, it’s just not the likeliest of scenarios. Let’s hope Wake3 comes along to save us WM users.

Deepfish is a mobile browser from Microsoft Live Labs. Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Multi-resolution of Deepfish allows you to zoom in and out of pages.

Deepfish don’t support ActiveX control, AJAX, HTTP POST, JavaScript and cookies yet and it requires Windows Mobile 5.0+ operating System and minimum 64 MB primary memory.

Microsoft Live Labs are still working on to improve its functionality and to enhance it features.

Google also has an application for better and fast access of Gmail.

Mobilitytoday ha effettuato un mini video demo del nuovo browser per Windows Smartphone, DeepFish in versione Beta…

Fonte:Mobilitytoday