Phases of the 'net

It would be my view that the history of the 'net can be described by breaking it into a number of phases. These phases aren't cleanly distinguished from one another - you can't say that one ends here and thus the other starts - nor are they intended to suggest that the last few decades can't be broken up into other differentlt flavoured segments. Not alone is there more than one way to skin a cat but you can use a dog or bonobo if you prefer, and instead of skinning it you could just stroke it. This is all just a means to take a semi-logical speculative look at the future.

The first phase of the net was primarily focused with connecting things, and people and places. This manifested in the development of URLs, Mosaic and so on. Following on from this, the 2nd phase, once people were able to link to one another, this phase was when people concentrated on the creation of vast amounts of user generated content, much of it rubbish or duplicates of what already existed admittedly. But for all that still very necessary. People were made to get to places, now they needed places to go and reasons to go there.

The 3rd phase which is the one we've seen over the last decade or so was next addressed to the problem of finding that content, or sorting the wheat from the chaff- in essence search. Finding what you wanted to find. You're no longer doing Lewis and Clark cross country discovery journey across the country but are focused on going from downtown Boston to the Drake hotel in San Fran. How do you do that?

Still for all the indexing and vast trawling and spidering that has gone on we are still left with a problem. That is that Google or whatever search engine you use might well find what you're looking for, but will you actually recognise it when it is shown to you? It's why something like Searchme or CoolIris is a sexier prospect than Cuil for the common or gardener user because it mirrors more closely how we as people already flick through artefacts when searching for things that we don't know about. That Cuil might find what you're looking for is less important if you can't recognise that they've found it.

In my opinion, there are two broad types of search. There is the looking for your keys type - you know what it is you are looking for but not quite where it is - and then there is the looking for a present for your nephew if you're an aunt - you know sort of what might suit but don't have a solid idea in your mind.

This is why I reckon that the phase we're heading into now or are already in is mostly about presentation. Showing us what is there. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, and I'm sure that others are or have already written about it in more depth or greater insight. It is odd how the desktop is still just a mess of a thing, though the likes of BumpTop are seeking to do something around that. We have had connecting, making, finding and now showing. Where after that? I think deciding comes next. How do we choose...

The personal aspect for me in this idea is that I think I've found a way to marry my concerns about the expression and fostering of opinion via blogs and also how to present divergent views in such a manner as to allow a genuine exchange of views to take place, and for those who are reading those views to be able indicate support or dissent for all or merely part of the content. Rather than a Parliament, might we one day talk perhaps of a visualment or scribblement, or just pure divilment! Anyway, the idea would be that there will be more come from The Afterword at some point. Just not quite yet.

Cuil launches, drops the L plate too.

Saw on the beeb site that Cuill* or Cuil as it now is has launched. I had personally suspected that Cuil was going to go after the search as a service market for big iron folks but it is out there now as a Joe Public service.

Interesting that folks locally seem to be focusing on the Irish connection with Tom Costello, however there is a strong Irish link on one of the other co-founders in the office of the President of Cuill too. She was also in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around the same time as Marc Andreessen of Netscape. She is a very, very, intelligent individual and quite pleasant too.

The best of luck to them I say. Interestingly, their frontend UI puts me in mind of Searchme.com which is more a search assistant in many ways. Now if cuill were use the Searchme UI as an option I'd nearly count it as love at first site.

Update: Cuill is stated by some as being derived from old Gaelic, it doesn't state it was our form of Gaelic. In Manx legend in Gaelic it would seem that it was a Finn Mac Cuill who created the Isle of Man, and through Fionn mac Cumhaill or Fionn MacCool we get to the Legend of the Salmon of Knowledge. And hence the link to the name. Now, I'm off to the leaba to read my Poirot.

*Just to be clear I'm not the Danny Sullivan quoted in the beeb article. He would be a proper tech-head commentariat person to my amateur dabblings.

New directions in Search

A while back I noticed my posts getting visited by something called cuill and mistook it for a company that some friends are in the process of working up called...well, you'd best just wait for that exciting news. Anyway, it turned out not to be those folks but instead cuill (say it Cool!) is a search effort headed up by wife and husband team of Anna Patterson* and Tom Costello. Anna was someone senior with Google for while while Tom had his dalliance with IBM but they're running their own show now.

They got some 2nd round money recently and it would appear their key pitch is that their search takes 10% of the effort that it does for Google. I suspect the intent of something like cuill is to provide back-end search capability as a service to large corporate or governmental environments where the reduced overheard they speak of would really matter. I'm not sure the consumer end of search is all that bothered about the resources required when they are getting to have it for free.

Then I started to notice I was getting felt up as it were by another frequent visitor from Tempe, Arizona called searchme.com. I had a looksee and they're doing what I think are interesting things with the visual presentation of search results. Imagine if they had a client like this for the desktop we might be able to find some of those things we've lost on the harddrive. So it would seem that search isn't as static as some might think, and that old idea of some other new fangled interface for browsing or presenting content hasn't gone away either. There was a suggestion floated semi-seriously by some in the mid 90s that the Doom engine from ID could have been appropriated to give us that 3D world that Gibson et al had prepped us for. It never came to pass that I'm aware of in part because people thought that the footprint of the Doom client would be too large! Anyway, try the public Beta for size, it seemed to not be too keen on Firefox today but ran fine under IE and they have a blog too.

*I met Anna about.. Christ could it be that long ago?... 12 years ago now in Prague. She was at some maths conference and myself and a mate were in the city for sort of a lad's holiday. We were looking for an Irish pub that might have had the GAA results, net cafes being thin on the ground at the time. And we wandered into the James Joyce just of Staré Mesto, and we got chatting to her. I think one of us (probably me) made up some nonsense about working in the Oil industry mainly because we couldn't have looked more unlike some roughnecks in from the fields.