The 7th sense and intelligent client

I never waste my time on the sponsored links at my gmail client, but cannot avoid a glance on the web clip pulled from my del.icio.us subscription (pic below). After fighting through possible Google or del.icio.us ad keyword filtering algorithms, sometimes it's dumb smart as I keep "social" and "web2.0" two tags on the subscription.


This is an example of the rudimentary intelligent client at the 4th-tier with a service mashup (simply Google + del.icio.us at RSS level). In Marshall McLuhan's concept, technology, or this case in specific - the 4th-tier client, is an extension of human body. The client creates a digital human sensory system after seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, touching, and possible psyche power (the 6th sense). Technology builds up the human peripheral of the 7th sense for our cognition and perception at our digital environment.

Like our basic human sensory system, we can also develop the adaptive filtering capability in our 7th sense. In vision sensory, we can focus on the display items during window shopping, and totally ignore the reflective images on the glass (try to shoot a photo and see what you got). Similarly, I always unintentionally ignore Google ad sense content. My 7th sense was eventually trained in my brain by past negative experience (ad sense content is mostly noise to me).

PM's and developer's job is to relieve human burden at the 7th sensory, bottom line is to avoid the negative brain training for ignorance. Therefore, machine cooperated effective adaptive filtering should be built into the client, making the client intelligent. From technology side, semantic web (web3.0) will pave the path. Thereafter, the semantic powered intelligent agents (web4.0) will achieve higher level of machine intelligence, making sense for our 7th sense.

Mobile devices are naturally perfect human peripherals. The current widget trend will ease the construction of intelligent mobile clients. We will see the heated-up battle field of social apps on mobile world.

Where is the front-end?

Can you define the front-end for the web architecture? You did know the front-end, but probably you don't know where it is today.

Check out the job posts for "front-end" web developer positions by Ning, Meebo, Jaxtr, or startups alike, the skillset is no longer Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator. Sorry, no designers please. The hiring managers look resumes for ajax, hand coding XHTML, CSS, plus PHP, or Java, Ruby-on-Rails, and even SQL. Quite a lot "back-end" buzzwords mixed with "front-end" technologies.

The 3-tier web architecture was the dominating paradigm in web1.0 time. The dumb thin-client, the browser, acts as the front-end and is responsible for presentation only. The centralized back-end services forms isolated web islands. Web2.0 movement, specially the social aspects and requirements, is driving an architectural paradigm shift, creating the continent effect. What we see is a 4-tier web architecture and the "front-end" concept might become obsolete.

The new web paradigm has much stronger flavor of SOA (service-oriented architecture):

• Tier 1 - data tier. Instead of conventional local storage, remote web storage as the repository service is getting popular (Photobucket, Amazon S3, Google OpenSocial Persistence, etc.).
  
• Tier 2 - platform tier. Companies deliver the core competence as service platforms with open APIs (mostly RESTful APIs). Check out how Marc Andreessen clarified the three levels of platforms.
• Tier 3 - application tier. The application can be conventional website, but more interestingly, it can be a situational mashup of services supplied by platforms. Moreover, the mashup itself can happen on certain platforms like Ning. Technically, the app mashup can be implemented either at client side with ajax, or at server side with mashup services. There is no clear distinction between front-end and back-end at application tier regarding the functionality.
  
• Tier 4 - client tier. The conventional dumb client is pushed here. However, given the power of client processing capability, the client is no longer dumb but becomes more intelligent when empowered with client-side application codes (e.g. Javascripts or Actionscripts).
  

From islands to continent

In May 2007, Facebook announced open api to the developer community, the event triggered the subsequent open api race: Myspace, Ning, Meebo, Zillow, LinkedIn ... everyone suddenly claims to be an open web platform.

In my opinion, this web revolution is driven by the way we want to live in the web. The current Internet landscape is basically formed by islands interconnected by ferries (hyperlinks). Some islands have very dense populations but still isolate from other islands. The objective of the site is to turn you into an islander (user acquisition), make you settled down there (user registration), and stay as long as possible (user retention), and hope you enjoy your information hunting in your lonely islander life (user demand fulfillment).

The web landscape start to morph into continent from social aspects. In social networks, you constantly interact within your social groups. Islander life becomes quite stone-aged as you maintain friends at Facebook, expand your professional network at LinkedIn, share hobby photos at Flickr, all in three isolated social groups even there is quite valuable overlap in your physical acquaintance. For your social life, you want to live in mega-cities at connected, merged, blended continents. Your identity will surpass the site identity. Your social interactions will go beyond the site boundary. Your continental social experience is the center of the universe, not the site.

Technically, the continent construction is addressed by social app interoperability with the effort of opening up each platform. A social app mashup layer above individual platforms will deliver boundless social experience. Alternatively, recent Google's OpenSocial initiative attempts to construct bridges to interconnect the islands. Exciting technology. Regarding the practical execution, you can sense the challenge given the island analogy.

We live in the web

web1.0: we use the web
web2.0: we live in the web

The fundamental distinction of web2.0 is that the web is no longer a single user experience such as content search, price comparison, booking airline tickets, etc. Web experience now becomes a pervasive social experience, as long as there are user-to-user interactions or communities involved in site.

Social networks (myspace, facebook), social media (flickr, youtube), and social bookmarks (digg, del.icio.us) are obvious social applications for delivering social experiences. However, social apps are not necessarily fancy web2.0 inventions. In fact, some old web1.0 applications are extremely social. ebay is a community centric site where the feedback scores are its core asset in defending competitors (yahoo and amazon). Virtually all the online forums are very rich in social experiences, specially when the user starts to post and spends hundreds of hours in the community.

Web social experiences establish our virtual life in cyberspace. As we live in the web, web social experience is part of our daily life. Comparing to our physical social experience, which one is more "real"?

Believe or not, we live in a hyper-reality in that the artificial reality may seem more real. Watch out, our social life is engineered by social apps whenever and wherever we live in the web. Achieving healthy outcome from "social engineering" with best possible commercial gain, however, is not an easy task, if not impossible.