15 years ago I used to think of the world wide web as a place to *learn and get things done*. The principle of build and they will come worked some of the time and as more websites were built the importance of search engines became apparent. If I think about my own web use in recent times I frequently visit the following sites: Twitter, Gmail, Foursquare, Facebook, Flickr, Posterous, LinkedIn, eBay, Gumtree, BBC News, Wikipedia to the extent many are permanently open browser tabs. The big advertisers understand this behaviour. For example, Vauxhall's TV advert for the Corsa ends with facebook.com/vauxhallcorsa, just a couple of years ago it would have been http://www.vauxhall.co.uk/corsa.

How is it different?

Websites were standalone monoliths, an expression of all the marketing and communication initiatives of an organisation. Special offers, announcements and new products etc were announced from homepages, carried by email broadcasts or pointed to by various types of online advertising. Smart businesses enabled audiences to self-select, self-provision and even rate its products and services, this being achieved by so called back-end integrations to business systems. All of this is very organisation centric in it's approach. What's different is the new way in which some marketers are engaging with audiences. Rather than follow the (in my view) unrealisable promise of mass-personalisation and mass one-to-one marketing, they are using established social media destinations to promote their messages, products and ideas. A move then from organisation-centric to destination-centric marketing, a cool move because money is spent on campaigns and audience-engagement rather than tools that promise the world but leave you with the challenge of building a destination that can attract the odd few thousand fans.

What's next?

The combination of smartphones, geo-enabled services and social computing is going to change the way we use the Internet. It presents the first real opportunity for effective, invited personalisation and will introduce a new era where the Internet will assist us in our daily lives. At the moment, we experience and interact with our online worlds sat in one or two locations; home, work, that's about it. In these settings, I don't want or need a web journey that's *tailored* to my wants and wishes as assumed by some faceless marketer and executed via a clever set of algorithms. I have time to sit, to explore, to bring the online-world to me. Here's what's next: when I'm on the move, my smartphone know's where I am, the time of day, day of the week, how long I've been on the move for, where I've come from and how long ago. In the physical world, my phone can suggest friends, food, entertainment, special deals etc that makes sense to my physical context. Example: It's a hot Sunday afternoon, I'm heading home from Bournemouth beach and am stuck in traffic in the New Forest, an Augmented Reality *suggestion* pops onto my phone's screen suggesting a cool pint of my favourite beverage at the Cricketers, less than 3 mins from current location. Further it offers: would you like to read recommendations from others? See who else is there? Book a table? Get directions? And once you're there, do you want to check-in? Write a tip? Broadcast a message to friends to come join you? In this senario, search engines importance may diminish giving way to mobile applications like Foursquare, Tagwhat and TweetAR.

Or as @robhawkes put it: I definitely reckon physical computing is going to play a big part. The Internet will be brought into the offline world.

Continued../

Further reading:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/
http://aiimcommunities.org/erm/blog/enterprise-content-management-dead
http://www.nma.co.uk/3017290.article