Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

During a recent meeting, discussing the design and architecture of an upcoming product, we drifted into a brainstorming session with a great many big ideas floating around (the best kind of meeting!). The conversation led me to an insight into why Twitter and similar micro-blogging platforms should be used by everyone.

First – let’s take a look around…where is the web headed ? There seems to be a general consensus that the web is becoming ever more ubiquitous, that physical things are being connected to the web – and eventually MOST things will be connected to the web. This topic was presented by Kevin Kelly during a fascinating TED talk. Of course – the more things that are connected to the web, the more things will become searchable, using web-based search engines. And it seems clear that these search engines will have to become increasingly clever – they will have to be able to understand what you mean by your question, and they will have to return the most relevant and semantically meaningful results.

So – how will the search engines become better at what they are doing? There are several ways in which this might happen. “Web 3.0″ (aka the semantic web) is one way – once all the data is marked-up and described, the engines will know what the data means – no more guessing. The task of the search engine will not really be search any more, but will rather become a task of inference. The second, likely development is major improvement in natural language processing technology- if the engines can read English, or Chinese or Hindi (pick your language), they will be able to accurately provide semantically relevant results.

The third possibility is that search engines will become much more context aware – this means that they will look for information that fits into a certain context in order to present you with better results. How they will achieve this is not clear – it may very well be combination of natural language processing, semantic markup and some sort of “artificial intelligence”.

I believe that the ability to provide contextually relevant search results will form a very important pillar of future search technologies.

Let us consider context a bit further. The more information one has about something, the easier it becomes to place that thing into context. Context changes meaning. If the context is clear, the meaning becomes less ambiguous. Context may allow one to infer meaning. Context is the “setting” in which one  considers information.

And this was precisely the insight that I had…the more information about yourself that you place onto the web, the better you can be contextualised. Twitter now becomes a tool that you use to contextualise yourself. Even though today’s search engines may not yet be able to understand natural language, and may not be entirely capable of returning results based on context, you may be sure that future search engines will have these capabilities to a greater extent than is presently the case. And the web never forgets…web pages from the very beginning of the web is still available via organisations such as the Internet Archive.

Providing as much information as possible about yourself now, will provide the context future search engines and data management entities need to find your place in the great interconnectedness of all things. I predict that this contextual information will enrich your experience in the near future far more than it compromises your privacy today.

So…you should twitter for the sake of your future.