He starts by saying that the companies that have done well on the Web (Facebook, amazon, flickr, twitter, dopplr, etc) are much more than websites - they've broken out of the browser/page and manifesting themselves elsewhere (devices, other sites, etc). Moreover, they're all platforms and have benefited as a result; and some have made lots of money.

MOO - can print photos from services such as Flickr

The world of tomorrow? It will become "more bizarre and weird" as the Internet touches more things. He gives 3 examples:

1) A physical object responds to or visualizes data from the network.
2) Interacting with a physical object allows people to change data stored in the network.
3) A physical object acts as a sensor that writes to the web of data.

He talks about Nabaztag, a network-enabled rabbit toy. Ambient Orb, Wattson, Weather Underground ("like last.fm for weather") are other examples. He also points to AppleTV - "one of the few mainstream physical network appliances available". See last100's recent review of Apple TV.

So, when you're building a new web product it must play well with others - "it's good to design for recombination". Coates asks: what are the opportunities for your product if it can play well with others?

Weblogs and RSS are the technological background for all of this. He says this was the first step in the consumer web - where data is discoverable and explorable. Since then apps like delicious and flickr have expanded on this. So why open up your data? Coates lists 4 reasons:

1) Drive people to your service
2) People will pay for it
3) as advertising or to put yourself in the middle of an ecosystem
4) Make your service more attractive with less central development (eg flickr)

He says the main reason though is: network effects. New services can build on other services/data, and this makes the overall ecosystem more powerful. Oakland Crimestopping is an example.

Coates then talks about Fire Eagle, his latest project at Yahoo Brickhouse. Fire Eagle is described on its website as "a new way to share your location with friends or with other websites and services". It's all about geo-coding and the idea is for developers to "build all kinds of applications that respond to your location". Coates says that Fire Eagle has "APIs in two directions", so you can do geo-presence applications. He says that while the Fire Eagle site itself doesn't necessarily do much, other services can use the data and create powerful apps.

Coates next point: you can never have too much data. He follows up by saying that hierarchies can't take the weight - so we need to move to "weblike exploration". This latter point seems to complement well Peter Morville's theories about findability. Amazon is a great example, says Coates. They have moved to manifest their data outside the categories, into the pages themselves. i.e. Amazon used to have tons of tabs, but now you can explore its data from inside Amazon webpages (and in other services too). For example the "people who bought this" feature, tags for books, and Listmania. So, he says, top navigation is now just a jumping off point - there are lots of other ways to explore data nowadays.

Conclusion

As always from Tom Coates, an enlightening presentation - with many things for designers and entrepreneurs both to take away. The interesting thing for me about watching this presentation is how many real world examples Coates now has to back up his theories. When I first began following Coates' blog Plasticbag (and sadly he no longer writes long-form posts on it, just links), he was ahead of his time and - as he himself noted in this talk - only blogs and RSS were really representing the Web of data. But now we have many mainstream web companies with products that demonstrate the Web of data. And there is a lot more to come, as the Internet permeates real world objects and different devices.

The crux of Morville's presentation was that we're "at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet", but "the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story."

Findability in the Real World

Morville defines findability as "the quality of being locatable or navigable". It's becoming more important as information overload takes hold and mobile devices become more popular. As we've written about a lot on this blog, we're in an age where "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" (Herbert Simon quote). We also have many more alternate interfaces to information - and this will expand well past smart phones in the future.

So what kind of products will help us achieve findability? Morville says it won't be AI (e.g. a next gen Microsoft Bob) and he also says it won't be visualization technologies (something that perhaps our own Charles Knight might disagree with!). Although he says eventually visualization may play a part. He says business intelligence systems show a way forward - software that find patterns. He also says librarians are important, where "metedata is sexy" - indeed, see Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on sexy librarians!

Morville says it's about bringing together things like tags and taxanomies, not keeping them apart. He points to sites like Etsy, where users can classify their items and tag. He says the future of search will be "a future where search and browsing work together". He refers to a Marcia Bates article about "berrypicking".

Examples of Future Search, Right Now

Morville picks out a number of web products that he says point to the future of search and finadability. One company he mentions is Endeca, a "guided navigation" service which he says mirrors the way our pschology works when searching for information. Buzzillions is another app Morville highlights, which again provides ways for people to narrow and find what they're looking for.

Clusty is a hybrid solution, where humans design the taxonomy but there are automated algorithms to categorize.

Google, says Morville, "is really struggling". However he also says that Universal Search is a good exploration of bringing people into Google's algorithms - as an example a search for 'diabetes' guides people to different types of information.

He also mentions Flickr's clustered tags.

He ends by saying they we "need a lot more innovation". Google Book Search is an example, as is Everyzing which has searchable podcasts and interesting ways to browse it. So this is all expanding the "searchable web" - into audio, video, etc.

He also says that it won't be limited to the digital environment - more and more physical and digital worlds being melded together. aka "Internet of Objects".

Conclusion

In conclusion, he says we need to continue to focus on usability in this new world of findability - "but I hope we don't stop there".

An enlightening talk by Peter Morville and really demonstrated some of the groundbreaking web apps showing the way to the future of search. For more on these topics, subscribe to ReadWriteWeb's network blog AltSearchEngines.