Today I gave a presentation at the Media08 event in Sydney, entitled: What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It's an overview of some of the top trends we cover on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. The presentation is available as a slideshow (embedded below). Each slide has links to ReadWriteWeb content, should you wish to drill down on a topic more.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. The Media08 event was run by X|Media|Lab.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

Apple's iPhone is aimed to be a game changer for the mobile world and today has been one of the key turning points in that unfolding story. Today's announcements were basically two. The new iPhone SDK, or Software Development Kit, made all of the debates about locked or unlocked phones fade away into the distance. Second, allowing the phone to be tied to Microsoft Exchange and bringing in Blackberry-style push email turned the tables in the debate over whether the iPhone can be a business phone.

You can watch the official Apple video of today's announcements here. Details on the announcements and public reactions below.

The Developer Platform

The API for the phone, called Cocoa Touch, comes with an iPhone version of the same developer tools Apple offers Mac developers today. The Cocoa Touch toolkit will include the following, succinctly summarized by Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch: "Interface Builder, Instruments, and iPhone Simulator. Interface Builder lets you drag-n-drop an interface together for your new iPhone app. Instruments is a suite of performance analytics tools. And iPhone Simulator simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone letting you test an iPhone app from your Mac."

The announcement focused extensively on the location awareness capabilities the phone has and by all accounts developers are very excited to get their hands on it. Apple will open an iPhone App Store and take 30% of all transactions made there. Apps will not be allowed to be distributed in any other way. Mac developer and Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber talked to a variety of other developers today and has a good discussion about details from a developer perspective and how excited his community is.

Venture Capitalists Kleiner Perkins announced at the Apple event that they are launching a $100 million fund to finance companies developing applications for the iPhone.

Enterprise Ready

In making the announcements today, Apple quickly and repeatedly said they'd be taking steps to satisfy Enterprise IT departments. The fact that the phone can only be used on one carrier seems the biggest issue there, but many of the issues relevant to enterprise use cases are well explored by Ephraim Schwartz at Infoworld today. There's extensive work being done to create equivalence between the information on the desktop and the phone. There's smart database infrastructure being set up for the new iPhone software. There's a whole lot going on there.

Apple's iPhone SDK has overshadowed a flurry of other mobile news this week, including the announcement that Nokia devices will carry Microsoft's Flash competitor Silverlight, but it's all just evidence that mobile really isn't dead. Quite far from it. You can follow the latest news and debates on issues like location awareness/privacy and user interface via the mobile resources in the RWW Toolkit for Key Topics in 2008.

The comment of the day for yesterday was from our post Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. Sarah Perez noted that IE8 "showcases many new features and improvements, like Facebook and eBay integration, standards compliance, and the ability to work with AJAX web pages." Sarah wrote that "this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox's creep into browser market share lightly." However commenter theharmonyguy thinks that IE8 is as much a challenge to Google, because "some of the new features seem similar to things like gadgets in iGoogle."

Congratulations theharmonyguy, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.

Here is his comment:

"Good news: Passes Acid2 (translation: great CSS 2.1 support, including things like display:table), defaults to standards mode (both previously announced).

Bad news: Still no support for application/xhtml+xml, not even close on Acid3 (Opera 9.5 9755 passes 61), not good support for CSS3 selectors (granted that's not officially a final spec, but Opera 9.5 9755 gets 100%).

I'm dubious about some of the new features... interesting how Microsoft seems to continually rely on tying together their spectrum of offerings. IE8 includes convenient shortcuts to other web sites for various info... and many of those sites just happen to be Microsoft sites. I don't blame them for linking to their own services, but ironic that Microsoft is essentially "bundling" again.

Some of the new features seem similar to things like gadgets in iGoogle... this release is as much about Google as Firefox. Very happy to see that the WebSlices setup does not introduce proprietary tags and even uses the hAtom microformat.

I'm sure many users will find things like activites and WebSlices handy, but it still seems to me that Microsoft is way behind the curve on features innovation with web browsers. Many of these features have long been available via plug-ins. However, I'm glad to finally see features like session recovery.

All in all, this release is good news. It definitely demonstrates the IE team is serious about web standards now, and it signals we'll be seeing IE updates more frequently. IE8 is still behind other browsers in many ways, but kudos to the IE team for the progress they've made - it's going to help developers and users a bunch."

The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical information on populations, demographics, trade, commodities, agriculture, employment, the environment, industry, education, tourism, and much more.

For many people, the first source for data is a Google search or a Wikipedia entry, however educational institutions and news agencies generally frown on using data from these sources, especially considering some of the inaccuracies found on Wikipedia not too long ago.

But now, students, journalists, and everyone else can access data straight from the source - the actual statistics published by the UN.

Using UN Data

Underneath the search box on the homepage are a few popular searches, based on what users are searching for the most. You can either click on those or enter in your own keywords to begin.

For example, to see data about a country, you just enter in the country's name and click "Search." The search result will take you to a landing page where some general information about the country is provided, like population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. You can click the link to "view full profile" to get the full details of that country's statistics.

To the left, is a box where you can apply filters to your search by specifying that you want to include or exclude certain information from your search.

Below the country's profile are all the search results for that country. Each result has a "Download" link to download the data, but there is also a handy "Preview" link which will open a small window displaying the data, so you don't have to navigate away from the page you're on to see if that data is what you were looking for. Another link, "Explore," allows you to delve into to related data sources around that topic.

You can do more than search for data on specific countries or regions, though. You can also search for data about global statistics, like greenhouse gas emissions or global solar production statistics (well, that's what I looked up).

What's great about the UN Data site is not just the ability to access this huge database of statistics (currently 55 million+ records), but the well-designed way that such massive amounts of data have been provided to the public. Anyone can use this database - school kids, techies, even mom and dad. This is one site that is definitely worth a look.

Google announced a new feature for its web analytics product this week that illustrates well the potential in anonymous aggregate data analysis. This siloed product announcement points to an even more exciting future if data portability dreams come true.

Google Analytics Industry Benchmarking will let users opt-in to share and have access to aggregate traffic info for websites in their industry vertical and at other points in their supply chain. (See sample screenshot below.)

The idea is to allow companies to compare their website performance over time and to put their experiences in context with the experiences of other related businesses. If an action you took seemed to have caused a big traffic spike, it would be good to confirm that it was not just an industry-wide traffic increase that actually occurred. Likewise, if traffic growth for your business has a particularly strong correlation with growth in a related businesses sector, then some biz dev time might be warranted there.

Online invoicing service FreshBooks has been doing the same kind of thing for individual contractors for some time ("other consultants in your field are getting their invoices paid on average 2 weeks faster than you are"). Personal finance service Mint compares your spending habits to those of other users, NetWorthIQ uses aggregate financial data for wealth benchmarks and Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog displays aggregate traffic trends for users with similar web browsing interests.

These kinds of data driven value add are enabled in most cases by the network effect of a successful app but also by the world of web services. If recommendation engines are often the result of aggregate information analyzed and pointed at an individual, then industry benchmarks may be the flipside - aggregate information aimed at organizations.

Just add data portability to change the game

The new Google Analytics Benchmarks are a peek into an exciting future and a further example of how data portability could yield even further innovation. Today a huge business like Google can best scale these kinds of data sets in-house, but imagine a future when secure data portability is a reality.

If users could port their commercial or behavioral data from service to service, then analysis of significant aggregate data could take on forms limited only by an innovator's imagination and ability to persuade users to bring their data to the party. That kind of value add could become the core of any number of services in the future. It's very exciting.

Standards based data portability is clearly not a requirement for startups to be able to quickly scale services based on analysis of anonymous aggregate data, but it would be a game changer by making this kind of innovation much, much easier. For now we'll have to enjoy innovation in the big data silos and imagine the future when this kind of access to data is blown wide open for vendors.

O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference, which was held this week in San Diego, brought together key people who are shaping the newly born social platforms industry; platform providers, app makers, investors, advertising networks, etc. Our own Sean Ammirati was one of the speakers and has already covered some of the most important bits from the conference, including Charlene Li's keynote. In this post, we'll quickly recap and highlight some of the important announcements and important data that we were able to extract. We also have a short interview with RockYou! founder and CTO Jia Shen.

Keynotes

GSP kicked off with the Charlene Li keynote. Charlene talked about the social graphs provided by the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial as "the air of tomorrow's web." What she meant was that the social graph is going to be an essential piece of tomorrow's web, and the sites which don't embrace it will most probably become extinct.

The second keynote came from Amit Kapur of MySpace. Amit gave important insight about the monetization of their network, but admitted that "social networking is hard to monetize," which is something we have also heard from Google. Amit said that regular contextual advertising doesn't work well for social profiles and that's the reason why MySpace is focusing on their own monetization technologies, which they call, HyperTargeting. HyperTargeting is already in use by big clients such as EA, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Proctor & Gamble, and FOX. But he added that they are also planning to release a self-serve solution for long-tail advertisers. Presumably, it will be a social doppelghanger of Google AdSense.

The third keynote was given by Benjamin Ling of Facebook. He made some important announcements, including the new E-Commerce APIs that they are planning to release soon, as well as the new user-driven localization solutions that they will provide for app makers. Facebook Platform investors at the event were unanimous in their belief that the E-Commerce APIs are big news, because it means new business models and revenue sources for app producers. On the other hand, their localization solutions seem to be just another step in their recently debuted internationalization efforts. Indeed it would be inconsistent to offer a localized platform which barely has any localized apps on it. And the good thing is, since this is user-driven, the costs for app makers to get international is low and also linearly dependent on their merits.

Day One Announcements

Following the keynotes, there were a number of interesting announcements made, including:

• NetVibes introduced Ginger. Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to pull in friends from your existing social networks, share news with them and follow their reading activities. In other words, as NetVibes' Chris Damsen noted, Ginger makes Facebook, your private place on the web, a more public place.
• MyBlogLog introduced Bluetooth capabilities and a new FriendFeed-like feature. The Bluetooth feature allows you to see other MyBlogLog users who are close by. When we tested it with Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog, at least 10 MyBlogLog users who were attending the conference showed up on our list. In some sense, this new feature brings MyBlogLog's distributed social networking into the real world.
• Bebo, Myspace, hi5, and Friendster are launching or have already launched their own OpenSocial-based platforms.
• Chris Messina of Citizen Agency introduced his distributed social network project, DiSo. DiSo's architecture depends on existing open standards such as OpenID, XRDS-Simple, and microformats. It sounds very geekish for now and is too-focused on technical aspects, instead of the social realities that actually make a network work. But it has the potential of becoming the "Linux" of social networks.

Day Two

Compared to day one, day two began with more technical topics. MySpace's Jim Benedetto gave some information on their new platform, which extends existing OpenSocial v0.6 standards with MySpace specific features like bulletin boards. The interesting point about the MySpace Platform is that it is going to launch very restricted. All app submissions will have to go through a safety review process by humans. Hence there is going to be an unavoidable lag between releasing an app and its availability on the network. But all these limitations will be slowly removed with a measured approach, according to Jim. He said that this is to prevent spam and protect the long-term value of the platform.

As most of the app developers in the conference noted, including representatives from RockYou! and Slide, restrictions by platform providers will definitely cut down their fast viral growth opportunities, but the applications that create a real value for the users will still be able grow virally, perhaps at a slower pace but stickier.

One of the shortest but definitely most informational sessions of the event came from Roger Magoulas of O'Reilly Media. He showcased some very interesting numbers and statistics that O'Reilly has collected from the Facebook appsphere. In summary, he showed that:

• installation numbers are no longer as big as they used to be
• active usage rates have dropped significantly too
• most of the apps are released under the "just for fun" category
• there is more adoption and engagement in "games"
• there is a tendency towards winner-takes-all; 1% of apps have 75% of app users, 20% have 99%

Later, in a session that brought together top Facebook game developers, including Mark Pincus of Zynga, there was agreement that social games will replace casual gaming, just like Facebook messages are replacing emails. Also Mark noted that live games don't work so well on Facebook, because once people leave the game, they don't come back; so in order to create real engagement, asynchronous models (as in Scramble) are far better, because people love to email their friends and call them back to the game.

Some other interesting notes we picked up during the course of the event:

• Facebook advertising is starting to get very profitable. Peanut Labs announced that they distributed $200K to their members just in the past 1 week.
• New advertising models (besides CPC and CPM) are emerging inside the Facebook Platform. The CPI (Cost Per Incentive) model of SocialMedia and the CPE (Cost Per Engagement) model of VideoEgg are just a couple of examples. With CPI, the user is invited to install other apps; with CPE, the user is shown a lightbox page which appears as a new layer on top the Facebook canvas page that he was actually looking at.
• Facebook called on people to produce productivity apps and focus on the long-term value, not viral growth.
• The OpenSocial crew presented Shindig, an open source, Apache-incubated OpenSocial framework for those who are interested in hosting OpenSocial apps inside their network. They have also introduced CAJA, a Javascript sanitization sandbox which allows Javascript code to be embedded into OpenSocial apps safely.
• Investors noted that app makers shouldn't expect to become instant millionaires with their applications. They also highlighted the importance of long-term value and stickiness.
• Facebook app makers are concerned about Facebook's moves to release their own apps; like Pages. They think that Facebook should just provide the platform and not be involved with new apps anymore.

A Brief Interview with Jia Shen

At the end of the day, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jia Shen, the CTO and co-founder of RockYou! and ask him a few questions. Jia acknowledged to me that his company has had a tremendous advantage over others by entering the field early, he also said that these platforms are becoming less permissive for viral growth because of their new safety restrictions - which is why those who plan to make a Facebook app are strongly encouraged act as quickly as possible.

I asked Jia about their ad network, how it was going, and what is the percentage of revenues from non-RockYou! inventory. He told me that it is going well and that the non-RockYou! inventory now accounts for a majority of the revenues generated on the network. He noted some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Sony. He also said they are not planning to enter the long-term advertising race right now.

As for localization and the growing number of international social networks opening up new platforms; he said that they will look at the specific characters of the network that they are entering and make necessary changes to their apps if required. But he added most of their apps are generic so they don't expect big changes. I asked him whether they're planning to make acquisitions to get the leading app makers in outside markets, and he told this is not their primary strategy yet, but if they do, their first target will be big demographics such as apps for Spanish speaking countries.

Jia also said that they have no preference between the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial, they will embrace both, but they support standards and the idea of writing once, running everywhere.

Conclusion

All in all, GSP was a very useful event for anyone working in the social networking industry. There were a number of enlightening sessions and key people who drive the social future of the web were in attendance. As Charlene Li noted, users will get suffocated without the portable social graph; so as a web developer, you'd better catch up with these latest developments and get ready for the future of the web in order to keep your visitors happy. The move of Sheryl Sandberg from Google to Facebook is more than enough to tell you where we are headed.

Shyftr, which stands for "Share Your Feeds Together," is a new online feed reader that combines RSS with a social network that's built solely around the feeds you read and share with your friends. You can use Shyftr to read your own feeds, read the feeds of other users by viewing their feed list, or search through the content of the Shyftr network to find new feeds that interest you. Will Shyftr be the next big thing for RSS? Or is just another social network?

Signing Up

When you sign up for a Shyftr account, you're presented with a screen where you can optionally choose to add some of the more popular feeds from various categories to your feed list. There are feeds available in areas like News, Gossip, Technology & Science, Food/Home, Sports, Music, Politics, TV/Film/Entertainment, Humor, Shopping, and strangely, New York, wherein the city itself gets its own category. This made more sense when I realized that the company was founded by Upshot Interactive, a company based in NYC, but it still seems like an odd addition. You can click the checkboxes next to the items or you can click "Skip This" to move on without adding any feeds.

Now you'll be on your profile page where you can customize your profile picture and bio and add feeds to your account. You can add feeds manually, but the ability to import an OPML file isn't available yet. Another option is to visit the "Popular" tab at the top to find popular feeds. If you read a story on Shyftr and you decide you would like to subscribe to that feed, you use the "Shyft" button to add that feed to your reading list.

Shiftr Profile

The Basics

When working with your Feed List, you can view all items, unread items, and can mark items as read, just as you can in Google Reader. Also like Google Reader, you can tag feeds as you read them, however, in Shyftr, your tags are displayed as a tag cloud and not as a long list of items at the bottom of your reader. Your feeds can be organized  into folders, which are called "Feed Sets" in Shyftr, and these will show the number of unread items. next to them.

Shyftr Feed List

Getting Social

What really makes Shyftr stand out from other feed readers is the social aspect. You can add friends and see what they're reading and what they've "pocketed" (saved). "Pocketed" is sort of like Google Reader's "Shared items," but since the whole reading list is shared, calling it "shared" just wouldn't work. You can easily add your friends feeds to your reader by using the "Shyft" button, just as you can with feeds on the "Popular" page. ("Unshyft" will unsubscribe you.)

You and your friends can send individual stories to each other or suggest feeds by using Shyftr's "suggest" feature, which is accessing by a button at the top of the feed or, for sharing feed content, below the story itself. Like RSSmeme (our coverage), all feeds can be commented on, too.

Search

Using Shyftr's search function, you can find new feeds, friends, or content. You just enter in your search term, then click "Content," "Feeds," or "Members," depending on what you're looking for. Shyftr also introduces "Guides," which are "virtual friends," and not actual people, who can help you find feeds of interest. For example, there is a Guide for Apple, a Guide for Movies, a Guide for CNET, etc.

Shyftr Search Result

Conclusion

Feed reading has been traditionally been a solo activity and until recently, with the advent of "Shared Items" and RSS aggregators, did RSS finally venture into the social space.

If Shyftr adds critical features, like the ability to import OPML for starters, then they may have a jump on the next big trend for RSS - social RSS. That is, unless people's social networking burnout has everyone taking a breather from joining more social networks. Although you can add "friends" in Shyftr, they might not be the same kind of friends as you have in Google Reader. In Google Reader, your friends are really your friends - they are people that you email with, something that implies a tighter connection than what you have with "online buddies."

Still, I can see where it would be the social aspect of Shyftr could allow it to be an excellent resource for finding new sources of information. Just imagine if you could poke into the feed list of your favorite bloggers! (Something that ShareYourOPML allowed, before going offline). So I can see where Shyftr has potential if enough people join.

So if you join, add Louis Gray as your friend, who introduced me to this service via his blog post - something you would have known if you could see my RSS!

Shyftr, which stands for "Share Your Feeds Together," is a new online feed reader that combines RSS with a social network that's built solely around the feeds you read and share with your friends. You can use Shyftr to read your own feeds, read the feeds of other users by viewing their feed list, or search through the content of the Shyftr network to find new feeds that interest you. Will Shyftr be the next big thing for RSS? Or is just another social network?

Signing Up

When you sign up for a Shyftr account, you're presented with a screen where you can optionally choose to add some of the more popular feeds from various categories to your feed list. There are feeds available in areas like News, Gossip, Technology & Science, Food/Home, Sports, Music, Politics, TV/Film/Entertainment, Humor, Shopping, and strangely, New York, wherein the city itself gets its own category. This made more sense when I realized that the company was founded by Upshot Interactive, a company based in NYC, but it still seems like an odd addition. You can click the checkboxes next to the items or you can click "Skip This" to move on without adding any feeds.

Now you'll be on your profile page where you can customize your profile picture and bio and add feeds to your account. You can add feeds manually, but the ability to import an OPML file isn't available yet. Another option is to visit the "Popular" tab at the top to find popular feeds. If you read a story on Shyftr and you decide you would like to subscribe to that feed, you use the "Shyft" button to add that feed to your reading list.

Shiftr Profile

The Basics

When working with your Feed List, you can view all items, unread items, and can mark items as read, just as you can in Google Reader. Also like Google Reader, you can tag feeds as you read them, however, in Shyftr, your tags are displayed as a tag cloud and not as a long list of items at the bottom of your reader. Your feeds can be organized  into folders, which are called "Feed Sets" in Shyftr, and these will show the number of unread items. next to them.

Shyftr Feed List

Getting Social

What really makes Shyftr stand out from other feed readers is the social aspect. You can add friends and see what they're reading and what they've "pocketed" (saved). "Pocketed" is sort of like Google Reader's "Shared items," but since the whole reading list is shared, calling it "shared" just wouldn't work. You can easily add your friends feeds to your reader by using the "Shyft" button, just as you can with feeds on the "Popular" page. ("Unshyft" will unsubscribe you.)

You and your friends can send individual stories to each other or suggest feeds by using Shyftr's "suggest" feature, which is accessing by a button at the top of the feed or, for sharing feed content, below the story itself. Like RSSmeme (our coverage), all feeds can be commented on, too.

Search

Using Shyftr's search function, you can find new feeds, friends, or content. You just enter in your search term, then click "Content," "Feeds," or "Members," depending on what you're looking for. Shyftr also introduces "Guides," which are "virtual friends," and not actual people, who can help you find feeds of interest. For example, there is a Guide for Apple, a Guide for Movies, a Guide for CNET, etc.

Shyftr Search Result

Conclusion

Feed reading has been traditionally been a solo activity and until recently, with the advent of "Shared Items" and RSS aggregators, did RSS finally venture into the social space.

If Shyftr adds critical features, like the ability to import OPML for starters, then they may have a jump on the next big trend for RSS - social RSS. That is, unless people's social networking burnout has everyone taking a breather from joining more social networks. Although you can add "friends" in Shyftr, they might not be the same kind of friends as you have in Google Reader. In Google Reader, your friends are really your friends - they are people that you email with, something that implies a tighter connection than what you have with "online buddies."

Still, I can see where it would be the social aspect of Shyftr could allow it to be an excellent resource for finding new sources of information. Just imagine if you could poke into the feed list of your favorite bloggers! (Something that ShareYourOPML allowed, before going offline). So I can see where Shyftr has potential if enough people join.

So if you join, add Louis Gray as your friend, who introduced me to this service via his blog post - something you would have known if you could see my RSS!

What's the most in-demand API on the web that hasn't existed until today? Wether they knew it or not, millions of people online have thought to themselves "why is this new site I'm on asking me for my Gmail username and password? When will there be a secure API for me to pass those contacts allong without giving up my password?"

That day has come. The Google Contacts API went live tonight and it enables far more than just contact transfer.

According to the Contacts API site, the new API allows application developers to enable their users to:

• Synchronize Google contacts with contacts on a mobile device
• Maintain relationships between people in social applications
• Give users the ability to communicate directly with their friends from external applications using phone, email, and IM

"The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub," the announcement says. "It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the 'updated-min' and 'showdeleted' parameters."

Pretty hot read/write stuff and particularly interesting given today's developer launch of the location tracking Fire Eagle from Yahoo!

One thing Fire Eagle has going for it that the Google Contacts API does not is support for the open authentication standard oAuth. Support by Google for oAuth in this API would have reduced the work required for developers by allowing code from other authentication proccesses to be reused. Google is supporting oAuth in OpenSocial, but on some days that hairball is harder to get excited about that a nice simple API like this one that delivers clear value.

Today's a big day for developers, may the secure Gmail contact leveraging begin!

The other day I was sitting in the bank watching a clerk copy information off a paper bank transfer to initiate a new wire transfer. Being a busy person I hate inefficiencies, and this was just plain bad. When I asked why the bank didn't use an electronic copy to speed up the process, the clerk replied that using an electronic copy can create mistakes and cause liability for the bank. In the same way that people are mistrustful of electronic elections, they believe that a human being copying from a piece of paper is less prone to make mistakes than doing the same thing electronically.

I smiled when I heard that, because I know it isn't going to last.

According to Wikipedia, papermaking was developed in China during the early 2nd century. Since becoming the de facto medium for recording knowledge, paper has evolved to also become the medium of transferring information in the modern world. Now, however, paper is being surrounded by an increasing number of digital rivals. We can debate how long it will be before the next generation of e-book readers kills printed books, but the days of paper as an information storage medium are almost over. In this post we look at the role of paper in our information-rich lives, from books and newspapers, to receipts and office documents.

Paper as an Information Storage Medium

The power of persistent information is awesome. If you have never contemplated what it would be like without it, just take a moment now to think about it. In a world where passing information is only done orally, information transfer is very limited and inefficient. The invention of paper and writing was perhaps as important and critical in the development of modern humans as the invention of language. Persistent information is responsible for both the rise of living organisms (DNA), and the rise of civilization.

Most of the knowledge that we gain comes to us via the written word. The burning of the library at Alexandria by Julius Casesar is considered to be one of the greatest losses of knowledge of all times. Understandably so, because books used to be a precious commodity in the ancient times, accessible to an extremely limited number of people. With the invention of the printing press, books took off, followed soon after by newspapers. Then, suddenly paper was not only the preferred method of storing knowledge, but also the best way to record and transfer information.

Paper as an Information Transfer Medium

While nobody (yet) minds books, people are increasingly being fed up with receipts, envelopes, bank statements, and other forms of paper as an information transfer medium. We cringe at the lengthy receipts we get after a shopping trip to Costco and at stupid credit card statements like the one below. It is the moments when we see things like this that we realize: this is wrong and this has to go. Once again, Apple has it right before anyone else. At Apple stores, after paying by credit card you're asked for your email address and your reciept is sent to you electronically.

With online banking becoming so ubiquitous we now let out a sigh every time we have to actually write a check. Not only are we annoyed with paper, we are annoyed with the process of hand writing - typing is so much more elegant and cleaner. And the change is not just happening at home, it is also quite visible at work. Yes, we still have a ton of paper around the office - but it is increasingly less. More people are now used to reading off the computer screen without having to print first. PDF is now the official means of corporate bureaucracy.

As mobile devices get smarter, the days of paper as an information transfer medium are nearing an end. In the next decade, we will get rid of receipts, doctors will not be hand writing us referrals, and banking will be done only online. The replacement of paper is not an accident, but a trend. Paper is bulkier, dirtier, less safe and not as good for the environment as its digital competition. Part of the bigger trend towards turning physical things into digital, paper is finally giving in after centuries of reign.

Digital vs. Physical

Whatever can be digitized will be digitized. Hardware can not compete with software in elegance, simplicity, and cost. From the iPhone to online banking, digital things are superior to physical. Soon the clerk in the bank is not going to be retyping the wire transfer from a piece of paper. Soon we will be electing the president of the United States via electronic voting.

The phobia of digital things belongs to an older generation. The demographic that is growing up on Facebook won't think twice about keying their credit card number into a computer or checking a box and pressing the okay button to vote. But even the older generation is not as technophobic as we think. My mother in law learned to look at pictures of her grandkids on Flickr, and only rarely asks to print the photos. She recognizes the simplicity of digital without fully understanding it.

The Future of Books, Newspapers, and Magazines

But not all paper is made equal. Books are not going away as fast as other forms of print. While physical newspapers and magazines are visibly declining, books are still holding strong. The reason for this is that the experience of reading a digital book is still inferior to physical. Books are not dirty, but magical. We love the way they feel, we love to flip through the pages. Wandering through books in the bookstore is an adventure, while ordering a book on Amazon is still quite dry.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are clearly out of tricks. Online versions are superior, easier to read, quicker to get news out, and more interesting. Magazines are also struggling to reinvent themselves by including more pictures, changing editorial formats, and also rushing to engage their audience online.

The real question is just how important are our physical experiences with paper? Increasingly, they are less and less important. We are open to new ways of consuming information and interacting with it. Amazon's Kindle is an early example of how a digital device can deliver a more valuable reading experience.

E-Paper: Will Paper Have the Last Laugh?

And yet, in the end, paper just might have its revenge. E-Paper (Electronic Paper) holds a promise of combining the flexibility of digital with the feel of physical. It is easy to imagine leaving an e-paper based newspaper next to your computer each evening and waking up to a fresh copy of New York Times transmitted via a wireless connection. The newspaper itself would have the physical feel of a traditional printed newspaper, but would also take advantage of the possibilities of digital. You would be able to interact with the information in the newspaper much like you do now on the iPhone.

A bigger question is - given that we already have the iPhone do we even need e-paper? This is something that only time will tell. If people find newspapers, magazines, and books made out of e-paper interesting then the competition will heat up. But if people will just accept new ways of consuming the information, then the devices we already have today will take over.

Conclusion

After serving civilization for centuries, paper is receding and giving in to new, digital forms of persisting and transfering information. We feel both sentimental and relieved because of our love-hate relationship with paper. The increasing shift towards digitization is visible across industries and sectors. From banks, to grocery stores, to offices and homes, paper objects are losing their status quo as an information medium. Personally, I am happy to see paper go. What about you?