Sixth Sense: Sixth Sense is an extremely inexpensive interface ($350 to build the prototype) and it consists of some colored finger markers, a projector, and a camera on a necklace. Demoed at the TED conference, this interface has amazing potential. We reviewed this product as part of our post The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away.

Given Nikon's release of yesterday's first camera with a built-in pico projector and Mobileburn's demo of the Samsung Anycall Show phone, these little projectors are about to start popping up everywhere. For Minority Report fans, we may actually see these projector based interfaces used up for everyday tasks; however, it's more produce amazing entertainment for gamers.

Perceptive Pixel Multi-Touch Wall (Jeff Han's new project) and Microsoft Surface: In the world of alternative interfaces, these two workstations are extremely well known. Certainly not the inexpensive, mainstream touch interfaces we'd hoped for, their size and price makes them unobtainable to the average user. However, for commercial uses, they've certainly got that wow factor. The products are used for story boarding, geo-spatial command, broadcast media, museum exhibits, hotels and Surface is even in Disneyland's tomorrow land.

Scratch Input: Recently featured in Technology Review for his presentation at the SIGGRAPH Conference, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D student Chris Harrison created a gestural input interface using existing surfaces and an acoustic input technique. In other words, Harrison's interface uses scratches to communicate with his machine. By taping a modified stethoscope to a wall, Harrison got users to perform six scratch input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than 5 minutes of training. If Scratch Input were utilized by a mobile manufacturer, a phone owner could simply rest their device on a table top and use it to scribble out messages.

Pulp-Based Computing: While there's little information on these projects just yet, one thing is clear. The folks in MIT's Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group are exploring electrically active inks and fibers during the paper making process to create a new form of paper-based computing. Apparently the paper would react in the same way as regular paper; however, it would also carry digital information. While the project is only in its early stages and appears to be hooked up to a basic Arduino prototyping platform, theoretically this could be used to create a new type of Wacom tablet. Remember when Steven Levy wrote about losing his Macbook Air? A paper interface would take some serious getting used to.

Siftables: Created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, Siftables is a series of blocks that contain built-in motion sensors, graphical displays and wireless communication. The blocks can be programmed to interact with digital information and media to form a collective interface. Siftables have been used to create art displays, painting tools, calculators, games and even a music sequencer. Bug Labs also offers a similar open source block system for modular device interfaces.

The most important changes to the interface are connected with the new ability to group your friends into different lists. While most of the navigational elements of the regular version were on the top of the page, the new beta moves all of these elements to the right.

Adding friends to these lists is done through a nifty text interface that auto-completes names as you type them. Of course, if you can't remember the names, you can also add friends through the subscription sub-menu (see screenshot).

Overall, these lists are a very nice feature that will make using FriendFeed a lot easier in the future, as it will allow you to create specialized feeds with relatively little noise. This way, for example, you can group political bloggers into one list and tech bloggers into another, while updates from your close friends can go into yet another list.

Home Feeds and Comments With Date Stamp

One other nice new features is that you can now see the actual home feeds of other users. This is a great way of discovering new people to follow.

Another good addition to FriendFeed's feature set is that it now displays how long ago a comment was made when you hover your mouse over the little bubble next to every comment. Before, it was impossible to tell when a comment was made.

Posting

Posting directly to FriendFeed has now become a bit easier and the old "Share Something" button has been replaced with a text box at the top of the page (though interestingly, as you search, this box turns into a search box, which is a bit confusing). One nice new feature is that you can now directly upload pictures to FriendFeed. While we really like universal uploaders like Pixelpipe here, sometimes you might just want to send a picture to FriendFeed. This has been possible every since FriendFeed acquired mail2ff.com, but this new posting UI makes it quite a bit easier.

Still Some Unfinished Business

As much as we like the new interface for how it makes dealing with a lot of friends easier, there are still a few areas where FriendFeed could improve. In this new version, for example, the FriendFeed rooms you subscribe to are always visible, but searching for interesting rooms is still not possible.

FriendFeed also still has to figure out a way to deal with duplicate entries, as many users tend to share the same link over and over again, even though a discussion has already formed around the link somewhere else on the site.

Becoming the Default

As FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told us, the plan is to make this beta interface the primary FriendFeed interface after gathering more feedback from users and tweaking it accordingly. We think that this new interface is a great step forward for FriendFeed and we would assume that most users will switch over to the new interface long before it becomes the default.

Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

There are few things more important to the user experience than the interface through which we interact with the web. There is SO much potential for improvement in user interfaces! We wrote about some cutting edge strategies in this post in March, User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload (see the awesome 2D/3D game interface at the end of that post). Lately we've been inspired by the interfaces of apps like Skitch (see video at the very bottom of the page) and Jive's ClearSpace.

The First Round of Ideas

As any good call to action should, Mozilla's Concept Series kicked off with some examples of concepts submitted. All three of the videos below are very well produced but Mozilla says that you can submit mockups, prototypes or ideas expressed with any degree of sophistication. For instructions on making a submission visit the Concept Series announcement or just tag an image "mozconcept" on Flickr. That's what we did with our vision below these videos.

What I'd Like to See

Here's my vision of an interface I'd like to interact with the web through, though it probably wouldn't take much Mozilla energy to make it happen.

I love the Adobe AIR newsticker Snackr but more than that what I want are big pastel-colored buttons that appear wherever I'm interacting with information that I can assign tasks to. As may buttons as I want, with tasks that will send URLs or the information in those pages to another application or webpage. I'd like the buttons to have rounded corners, too. :)

In the image above I've got buttons to bookmark the link I'm looking at in my social bookmarking tool (I use Ma.gnolia), to open tabs searching for the links present in one of my Custom Search Engines, to search for this link in social media discussion aggregator YackTrack and to IM the link to multiple co-workers via Adium. In time I might find that there are other functions I'd like to add, re prioritize or replace the above with. It that too muck to ask? I don't think it is at all. Let me know when someone has built it - but for now, I'll tag it "mozconcept" and cross my fingers.

What about you, what would you like to see the future of the web look like?