The Visual Browsing Revolution

Everyone knows that if you spend two minutes clicking links on Wikipedia it’s easy to get lost in the tangled web of interrelations. But to visualize the connections, your best option is to get out pencil and paper, and to reconstruct your conceptual journey is a painstaking troll through your history.

The very words Internet and Web evoke an interconnected mesh of links and ideas – yet, save the mind’s eye, there’s no way to see it.

That’s why projects like Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus, Youtube’s Warp, Digg’s Swarm and Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine (I’m working on an alternate way to browse wikipedia myself) are so exciting.

I think, in terms of interface design, we are now at the same kind of turning point we were in in the 1980’s. Then, the only way to interact with a computer was to type in commands. Then emerged the GUI – suddenly there were “windows,” a “desktop,” “icons,” “pulldown menus” – the computer was now a space in which to work – people could understand the concepts of files and programs when files were represented by icons and programs manifested themselves on windows – it was a whole higher level of interaction, and going back to typed commands in a 1-dimensional, text-filled world was inconceivable.

Once visual browsing becomes mainstream, in whatever form it takes, once the “web” of connections everyone loves to hype is plainly visible instead of only imagined and a person’s trip across the web’s vast surface is represented as more than flat list, a browser with tabs and a back button will seem as utterly crude as the command line seems to us window-slinging mouse jockeys today. (Even the mouse seems really crude compared to interfaces like Microsoft Surface and the iPhone) Kids our current age won’t be able to imagine browsing any other way.

So it’s time to realize that conventional browsing sucks, that Firefox 2.0.0.11 is not the ultimate state of the web browser, that one page at a time, even with our beloved tabs, is a terribly narrow slit through which to view the unprecedented mass expression of humanity that is the World Wide Web!