Within six months, there will be an entirely new paradigm guiding user experience and human interaction on the web. All we lack is the language to adequately describe it. For language is the program which enables us to write programs, as it were, by communicating our needs and desires to one another in a constructive way - one which we can take action upon.

One of my goals is to inspire people to take actions which will bring them fulfillment in whatever ways they are ready for. I have been having a lot of ideas lately which I think could become the seeds for further action. You could, in fact, begin thinking of me as a kind of digital Johnny Appleseed. Sowing these possibilities is a challenge because you need to get the right seeds to the right kind of soil, and then all you can do is trust in local weather conditions and the goodness of Mother Nature to help them grow. [PS. Charlie Stross‘ Accelerando has been a big inspiration for me, even though I didn’t like it so much as a “book” when I read it…]

Attempting to operate in this fashion - according to principles of creative collaboration and mutually inspired abundance (among shared value communities) - has given me glimpses of how this “internet of the future” might work. For me, it hinges around two core concepts:

1. Perceptual blip-tracking
2. Social pingback management

Perceptual blip-tracking means something like: what is coming up on your radar, what type of information is getting close to you. (See my podcast: Cloud of Words, for a more esoteric take on that.) In other words, when you go out and a friend mentions the name of a movie, you should be able to automatically have this movie title added into your perceptual blip-tracking system. When you get home in front of your full-scale internet immersion device (climb into your web bathtub?) you should have waiting for you information pulled from IMDB, previews and clips from that movie, a smattering of reviews from trusted sources online (with graded ‘parity ratings’ to yours), as well as cultural and conceptual associations for you to explore on your own time.

You wouldn’t, of course, be forced to watch or interact with any of these things. The point is that the information is there, collected, organized and ready for you to take action on. The actions you take on information should NOT be organizing and collecting. That should all be done for you. The idea of a “search engine” is close to dead. You won’t “search” for anything soon. You will simply “have” (”have engines”?), (see: The Fifth Stratagem: Round up resources). Searching is an action. Having allows you to take action. Which paradigm is more powerful (which allows you to sow more possibilities)? One of the main actions you will take in the internet of the future will be deciding how much you want to immerse yourself, when and in what form (Immersion).

Then you will develop what I’ve taken to calling “shared value communities”: loose networks of people who are connected because the items on the perceptual blip-tracking system are growing increasingly similar (parity: people who have compatible interests to yours right now). You cluster together around “value nodes” or reference point keyword clusters which you each have a strongly-expressed proximity to right now. These are items which appeared on your perceptual radar, which you then took action upon (active immersion and possibly rearrangement of data points). Other people can then derive value from the actions you took. If their value is high enough to indicate shared passions, it may be suggested or automatically facilitated that you become friends. Perhaps the system says something like, “You guys should really talk. I think you’d both benefit from it.” And then it could find an existing social connection and use that to forge a mutual connection or introduction, and suggest possible ways to seed or inspire further conversation and interaction.

Social pingback management is where that begins to go. I’ve been thinking a lot about the different levels of “friends” which I have. As a quasi-public internet personality, I have a lot of different gradations of people I keep in contact with for various reasons. Not all of them are in the same group, or frankly of the same importance to me. Some examples of potential friend breakdowns, for me anyway:

1. People I primarily know in real life but don’t have any special connection with.
2. People I primarily know in real life and have a strong personal connection with.
3. Close friends
4. Romantic relationships
5. People who have commented on my website, but who I don’t really “know”
6. People who have commented enough on my website for me to have a sense of their personality.
7. People who have commented enough that I have a sense of their personality AND they seem awesome.
8. People like that who I strike up or they strike up regular correspondence with me.
9. People who I consider good potential collaborative partners because our interests overlap, but our skills are different.
10. People who are excellent resources for knowledge in a particular area of expertise.
11. People I would have over my house.
12. People I would consider drinking a beer with.

I’m sure there are other levels, and that is, of course, a totally arbitrary and informal break-down. But see, that is the thing about human relationships: they tend to be entirely arbitrary, informal, and very often weird and unpredictable. They don’t break down into easy technical categories; they are messy. They are real life. So far, no computer application exists to allow me to look at and manage my interactions with people in this way. Email lists, RSS feeds, MySpace friend lists, none of these do it for me. They are becoming woefully inadequate for the style of interaction which I am currently engaging in with people online.

Especially since I want to be able to manage all of these things from one centralized place. I don’t want to have to be running all over the internet to my five Gmail accounts, three Hotmail accounts (which I have let lapse because Microsoft has seriously lost the storyline), multiple blogs, many comments on various conversation threads (forum posts and comments left at mine and other people’s blogs, etc), multiple MySpace accounts, RSS feeds, e-cards, on-going games, social event invitations, etc.

I don’t need or want to communicate with all these people in the same way. Some I only want to send a short message back to. Some I just want to occasionally blast something across their perceptual radar without any specific personalized content (other than the point that I was thinking about them and thought they would find this interesting). Some people I want to sit down and really share my thoughts and feelings and form a well-written and lengthy email with. Other people I want to leave a voice message with, or talk with in person. Maybe what I need is actually a secretary, but it should be within the realm of technology to give me a useful approximation.

I mean, having to manage all that stuff as well as phone calls, voice mails, text messages (before I smashed my cell phone), etc - well it’s a full-time job. And seeing as I don’t have a regular full-time job, I can only imagine how much more difficult this stuff would be to manage for somebody who actually works in an office or something. That is: for people who have more sets of “perceptual/social identity centers” than I do. By that, I mean that each of us is made up of, effectively, sub-personalities which we only share or show under certain circumstances (I always liked the word “securacy” to talk about this). You don’t want all of your social contacts being able to read emails you send to one of them. And certain things in your browsing history perhaps you don’t want certain people to see. It may or may not be sneaky or underhanded, but whatever it is, there should be an easy-to-use system which manages all of these things.

I envision it partly as a web-application which plugs into API’s from many different sources. In another way though, I see it as a browser-level application. I can almost see a future where you don’t really even go to “web sites” any more. Databases, sources and “data integrity” are going to quickly become much more important. You are going to want to be sure that your “have engine” is feeding off of high-integrity sources. Also, everything in the future is going to have a fixed reference point address. A universal URL system which slips over into real life, and which can help you find your keys and socks in the morning. But that’s a whole other level of thinking and technological development past where the “perceptual blip-tracking” and “social pingback management” systems come in. But it pays to think well past your goal.

Awesome step in the right direction: Friends don’t let friends see adverts.

[PS. Reminder to myself: write about skewing search results/consensus reality ratings. I need to have a by-myself meeting later!]