Average User Evolving

It used to be, that the average user was driven to a computer by the concept of email and chatting to friends and family from around the globe in just one place. No longer was it necessary to write what you wanted to say in a physical letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it through the mail. All you had to do was get on your home computer and send them an email or chat with them on your favorite instant messenger client. Still, other technologies such as uploading and sharing files on the web were still something of a new technology that most new users were completely unaware of.Now, what drives the average user to a computer in the first place is no longer just email. The new motivator is a WAP and handheld device such as an iPhone or a Zune. The first thing they do with these technologies is find a computer or find a hotspot so that they can download new music and take it with them wherever they go. It’s no longer a matter of being able to get to a home computer to be able to IM your friends, but rather finding the best mobile device in order to do a number of things: instant message, email, check stock quotes, find your chosen destination on an online map application, upload new photos to your flickr account with the camera feature attached to your handheld, or read an article from one of their favorite news sites.Now, we have mashups where we integrate more than one online application in order to get the functionality that we want. An example of a mashup would be Twitter Vsion. Twitter is an online application that allows you to let other people know what you’re doing by online text messaging. TwitterVision allows you to view an active map of people who are twittering, what they’re saying, and where they’re twittering (or tweeting) from. How would a technology like this evolve into something for Web 3.0? Perhaps there could be a way to make twittervision only show you the tweets from people you’re “following” on twitter. Or maybe I could fill out a form of my personal interests and twittervision would show me tweets from people who regularly post things that I’m interested in. Maybe there’s a way that the web could learn from my tweets in order to be able to recommend me to other twitterers that it thinks I would be interested in.Bwana, someone who I’ve had a link of over on the right side of my blog page for quite some times now, has come up with quite an interesting way of how he harnesses information that he’s interested in on his own twitter account. Watch the video here for more information.How I’ve got my own twitter set up is just a little more primitive in that it’s not so much of an “active” gathering of information. If I want to keep up with someone’s tweets, and then later be able to find something that I’m interested in, I’ll subscribe to their twitter rss or their twitter “with others” rss feed that allows me to see what they’re tweeting and also what their friends on twitter on tweeting. Then, using the search feature in Apple’s Mail application, I’ll search for keywords on topics that I’m wanting to hear more about, and Mail will return to me matching results in a ranked order.In the above picture, you’ll see me searching through one person’s twitters “with others” rss feed to find out about google and found one person tweeting “UK Users Report Google AdSense Phone Verification Not Working” and a link to go along with it so that I can quickly read more information about that topic. I’m sure you can see how this could prove quite handy in obtaining information that you yourself are interested in personally.Could it be in the future where the average user is more interested in mashups and research than they are in email and IM? One thing’s for sure, as technology grows into a more vast and complicated world, so the average user becomes more intelligent from the beginning stages. Could the average user be able to read my thoughts using a Web 3.0 enabled handheld device? Are we going to be looking like cyclops in the future with headband shaped personal computers wrapped around our heads? It’s a possibility.