I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Region Västra Götaland). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

Integrity

Today young people have become used to using different web 2.0 technologies such as Flickr, Facebook, Delicious etc. So we have seen the emergence of things such as social search and folksonomies. People gladly contribute with information about themselves and what they think and like. I believe this is a good thing, but there are also some risks with this. These risks are that once something is on the internet and is indexed, it’s out there and it stays there. Many people are not aware of that fact. How do you keep your integrity when everything about you can be found online? Integrity is very important when implementing these solutions in an enterprise setting.

How can people contribute without having to share their stuff with everyone else if they don’t want to? Björn Jeffery mentioned that we’ve gone from sharing nothing with noone to sharing everything with everyone and that he thought this would change back to us sharing a lot of things with many people. I hope he’s right. Teenagers might note care who they share their stuff with, but security and integrity are vital issues when considering enterprise solutions.

Mobility

In these days mobility has become an important thing. We not only expect to be able to find the information we need but to find it whenever we want from where ever we want to. I am actually writing this blog post on a train, and off course I expect to have access to all Findwise and other resources from here as well. As technology changes our behavior and expectations change with it, and so does society. (I covered excitement generators in a previous post about Jared Spools keynote on HCI2007.)

“I don’t use computers, love. This is just the internet”.

quote from Elizabeth Churchills keynote

Today there is no longer an association between internet and the computer screen. Mobile phones have become an increasingly popular way of accessing the internet. So, you can use search to access all your company’s information from a single point of access when ever you need it. Then maybe next step is mobile search on your intranet? That would not only make information become available at all time but from where ever you might be, and exactly when you want it.

So in conclusion of these talks; I think that in the future we will want to be able to access everything from everywhere at any time. We used to talk about time we spent online. That distinction isn’t really there any more. Today our tasks are interweawed, we don’t separate time we spend online and offline. (Something that becomes painfully obvious when trying to work on the train when you’ve forgotten the usbconnection for the mobile internet.) And in that time we spend online we also need to define what things we want to share with whom. If we as designers can solve these things, I think we’re on to something promising.