Deconstructing The Web - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

Industry Standard, The, August 14, 2000 by Larry Downes

Your e-business strategy is not the same as your Web site design.

Once you figure out your e-business strategy, it's time to start designing the Web site, right? Not any more. The era of the browser, in which the world's information is linked together through Web sites, navigated with search engines and collected and reorganized through portals, is coming to an end. Over time, it will become an increasingly smaller part of what the Net economy offers those seeking competitive advantage.

If you focus your efforts entirely on today's Web-based architecture, you'll cut yourself off from an explosion of new devices, interfaces and software technologies that are proliferating at an accelerating pace.

Even if your customers, suppliers and other stakeholders are thrilled today to interact with you exclusively through the Web, it won't be long before they'll demand new services and new interfaces that operate through PDAs, cell phones, pagers, instant messenger clients and other computing devices. And not long after that, it will be time to communicate directly with noncomputing devices, such as cars, refrigerators and packages.

Indeed, the current investment mania for all things wireless and for scalable Internet infrastructure is built on a belief that the proliferation of connected devices will spawn new generations of killer apps. I share that belief.

The disruptive agents here include our old friend Moore's Law, which continues to drive the creation of smaller, cheaper and ultimately disposable client devices. At the same time, common data exchange standards like XML continue to spread and evolve. The result: an explosion of new opportunities for communicating information between everything and everything else. Few things in life (and in business) are as predictable as these trends.

The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture.

SCHIZOPHRENIC USERS

As we enter the next generation of information architecture, some of the Internet's pioneering companies, such as America Online, will find themselves saddled with their current Web-based interfaces. They won't work. A television is neither a radio with pictures (as it was first described) nor a diskless computer (as computer makers describe it today). Just as a car is not a horseless carriage, a car is also not a browser with wheels.

New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications.

As Microsoft's Rick Beluzzo put it at The Standard's recent Internet Summit, we are entering an era of "technology schizophrenia," where the same person takes on a different profile and personality with every device and application he uses. Each user takes on a role appropriate to the device, and the roles have different requirements for depth of information, timeliness, interactivity and speed. You will need a different information interface for each role surfers play.

THE AGENT ECONOMY

I recently became senior strategist for a startup company called Spyonit (www.spyonit.com) that is developing technology to serve "schizophrenic" users. Spyonit turns the browser model on its head by focusing not on Web design but on the underlying information and how it might be used. The company's technology lets its customers specify information that is important to them, what changes in this information they want to be told about, and how and where they want the information to reach them.

As a consumer, for example, I can create "spies" to watch the various auction sites and let me know when items I want are for sale, or when the status of a particular auction changes. The spy can notify me by e-mail, a custom Web page, PDA, cell phone, instant messenger or pager. For each device or client app, the notification is tailored to the device and my role. If I ask to be notified by cell phone, the spy knows that this is an interruption, and gives me only a headline. ("You've been outbid on Richard Armour's Twisted Tales From Shakespeare.")

Spyonit customers can also use the technology to deepen relationships with their business partners. Morningstar, the online financial information giant, has embedded spies on its site that lets customers signal how and when they want to be notified of changes to their portfolio. At the end of the day, it can send me an e-mail with the closing prices of all the funds I own; but if, for example, my technology holdings ever go over 30 percent of my total portfolio, I can have Morningstar page me. Each alert provides the company with opportunities to interact with its customers.