Joy and the Weird Web

Whether or not you agree with Bill Joy (cofounder of Sun and currently with Kleiner Perkins), he is undeniably a fascinating guy. I'm drawn to his writings and interviews, for his sense of humour and sometimes bewildering brilliance.

In this interview available on AlwaysOn, Joy describes different "types of webs", as related to the modality of the user experience. We've certainly heard the concepts about "lean-forward"/"near-web" or "lean-back"/"far-web" (which Steven Johnson attributes to Jobs in his most excellent book "Everything Bad is Good For You"). Joy describes these, and a few more:

"Then there is the far experience, which is that you are leaning back in more of an entertainment mode. It is a different way of experiencing the information. The near experience today is the web through your favorite browser, and the far experience, the passive one, is watching television but the active and interactive one is really video games. We were thinking about the near and the far user interface and really the near web and the far web—because the kind of content you have, the way you interact, your whole body position, your energy, what you want in those two different environments are very different."

...

"...we really liked what Wayne had said and [thought] there is more: There is also the here web, and the here web is the web to your mobile device because it's here, always with you. "

...

"Near, far, and here. The modality of the near web is mouse and bitmap display and menus, and that is the way we've done that. The modality of the far web tends to be joysticks and maybe gestures more generally or some interaction of pushing buttons—whatever we do in when we're playing games or interacting with entertainment. The modality of the here web is still evolving. Mostly it is a touch screen like on my Treo or cursor buttons up and down. It's voice intensive, and it's very personalized, and the screen format is very small. So the kind of information you have on these three webs is very different, and the style you use to interact with them is very different. To us, these seemed to be three very different modalities, three different markets. And then there is clearly a fourth."

Link to read more about the "Weird Web" and the rest of the article.

Posted by juechi at January 5, 2006 09:46 PM