Wandering electrons... but not too far

From one of my favorite sites, Smashing Magazine, comes this pretty impressive exploration of the near future in Information Technology:

Monday Inspiration: User Experience Of The Future

Follow the links and enjoy! I ran into at least one that didn't want to play nice with Opera, the link for Cheoptics 360, but it's worth the momentary detour via IE7, trust me.

Here's something that makes Minority Report seem so 20th century.

I stumbled upon this in an article at Wired.com entitled "Perceptive Pixel’s Multi-Touch Wall Now Available for $100K". They've inserted a YouTube video, but you can see a better quality video at the Perceptive pixel website -->

click here to go directly to it.

As they pointed out in the Wired.com article you can get it today from Neiman Marcus for a coooooool $100,000.

Oh, hold on, STARTING at 100k.

Personally I'll hold off until the price comes down to something reasonable, like, oh, I don't know, 70k

But what do you think? Are interfaces like this the future of Information Technology? One thing you'll notice when watching the video is that there is a type of cyber-keyboard that can be called up, and that's where I start wondering a bit. I mean, whatever we do, the written word is, and will continue to be, the main tool available for going beyond the 1000 words that a picture is worth. Can we come up with a more efficient tool for writing than the keyboard? (If you say, "yeah, a pencil", that's just the proof that you never learned to type correctly.) This is especially so when we're writing something that we intend to share with others using I.T. This type of interface is spectacular to look at, but will it be an efficient working tool? You'll notice that the people manipulating the device spend most of their time pushing, pulling, stretching and squishing pictures. That gives a good show, but is this thing going to be advantageous when I have to get that project off to the client before tomorrow morning?

I'll let you express yourselves, but one thing we can't deny: This is really going to impress the neighbors!

Like most people I have a good number of web pages bookmarked. However I've noticed recently-in fact for quite a while now-that in reality I virtually never use most of them. In fact, what usually happens is that I bookmark something, and then I just forget that it's there.

Why? Well, Google.

The performance of search engines has become so good these days that I find it much easier to simply search Google for the site that I want, instead of going/searching through the hierarchy of my bookmark folders.

Instead of Bookmarks>folder>subfolder>subsubfolder>subsubsubfolder -- site Y
I use
Google -- Site Y
And baf, I'm there.

If you know the name of the website (and you usually do if it's something that you'd bother to bookmark) you'll get THAT web site as you're first result 99.9% of the time. Even if you don't know the name, a few good keywords will usually make your target appear on the first page of results. This tactic is of course more efficient for large websites, but I'm amazed by how well it works for small sites too, especially if you know their names.

The only bookmarks that I use regularly are those illustrious few that have been ennobled to the personal bar, the first of which is, of course, Google, followed by Yahoo! and then a baker's dozen's worth of others.

There are now bookmark websites, such as del.icio.us, that have put new twists on the idea of keyword bookmarking, but they've never won me over as my preferred way to bookmark...

So what do you think? Is bookmarking still pertinent? As Google and other search engines get better and better at reading our minds, are we going to see a day when browsers no longer offer a bookmark function?

Voilà, today's existential question...

As this post had little to do with the Opera browser or technology, I've moved it my new "Wandering electrons... but not to far" blog, which is more oriented toward general interest subjects.

This specific blog post is here.