Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Home page of the 21st century

Jim Lanzone (SVP, Ask Jeeves) quotes Mark Fletcher (CEO, Bloglines) as saying he wants to build the "homepage of the 21st century."

What is the home page of the 21st century? What do you want from a home page?

I think it should be your view on the world. It should tell you about events that matter to you. It should tell you, this what happened that you need to know about today.

I think it should focus your attention. It should prioritize. It should learn what you want, what you need, and how to best help you find it.

What do you think? What would be your ideal home page?

3 comments:

Peter said...

Jezzzzzzzzzz.. what a crucial question thought !!

Looking back .. my second preference on web2.0 is bloglines.. I want to be able to see the chatter... Primary I still log onto my public email first.. and then log onto http://peterdawson.typepad.com.. or rather typepad.com to get ready to blog..

just wondering what this means . in social dynamics ??

Seun Osewa said...

For a long time, I have used Google as my home page, and I'm sure a lot of others do (firefox start page). I think it's instructive. Some people are saying, "I know what I want, just help me find it".

Artificial intelligence is good when it works, but when it's not so accurate it can be harmful. If I get a personalized newspaper, and I trust it to include all news that is relevant to me, then I might miss a lot of important articles when the newspaper's choices are perhaps 'just' 5% innaccurate.

The philosophy of 'show me what's popular, let me search/browse for what I specifically want' is probably powerful enough to outperform any AI engine that is not 99.5% accurate.

Amazon.com "people who bought/viewed this item also bought/viewed for" is a 'show me what's popular' feature.

I think that deep down human beings have this attitude: "Dear computer, I don't need you to make decisions for me. I just need you to make it easier for me to make those decisions."

Al said...

Hi Greg,

For me, the ideal home page would be built by a client-side agent that watches everything I do, and displays appropriate, related content. A 360-degree view of all my computer activities -- not a narrow view. What should get watched:

- Contents of what I read: web pages, emails, instant messages, address book entries, datebook entries, etc.
- Contents of media I listen to and view (songs, videos, etc.)
- Contents of what I search for, both on the web and locally
- Contents of what I write: emails, instant messages, blog posts, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.
- Contents of what I state is important: pages I bookmark, pages/documents I view for a long time
- And probably other things I haven't listed above

Privacy is important, of course. I should be able to turn off any of the above monitors, as well as manually modify my monitor logs.

Once all the information were available, you'd need to turn collaborative filtering to find appropriate content -- similar to what you do today with Findory, but on a larger scale.