E-BUSINESS

I am responding to a comment posted on my last entry:

“Didn’t you just argue against your own point? The constant communication is already happening, and will continue to happen, the filtering has nothing to do with Web 3.0, or Web 2.0, or anything. I am in constant communication with everyone i know, via email, blogs, SMS, etc., and filter out simply by not checking, and only allowing certain communication methods to reach me when I choose them to. I’m not clear what your not buying.”

I decided to respond with another post.

First of all, no one today is in the constant level of communication with user generated content that is described in the book.

Second, I disagree that filtering is not part of Web 3.0 (or whatever you want to call it).  Web 3.0 is also sometimes referred to the Semantic Web which means that web documents will be more structured and machine readable.  I believe this will be part of the evolution of web technologies and will ultimately create a vast world wide library of information.

Consequently, information retrieval algorithms will be more refined and filtering will be part of this refinement or users will not be able to find what they need when there are trillions and trillions of web documents.  I have observed friends and colleagues with information overload issues in e-mail and other communications.  I have experienced it myself and have set up rules in Outlook to filter e-mails into categories, generally consisting of ones to ignore, ones that are urgent and ones that don’t need immediate attention.

This information will consist of friends, family, etc. and businesses, marketers and other organizations vying for your attention, just like there are issues with e-mail spam today.  The spam will come in many different forms in the future and will use these new social networking/user generated content technologies.

This need for filtering will just grow in the future as the expanse of information exponentially increases.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction of the future of the Internet.

I recently skimmed through a book called “Groundswell“, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  The last chapter was an extrapolation of the current state of social software that they call the groundswell.

The future that they believe will be here within five years is one where everyone is in constant communication through blogs, ratings/commenting systems, social networking software and instant messaging.  You will get notifications from friends, work, entertainment, etc. all the time.

I’m not buying it.

With all the self publishing occurring, the amount of information on the Internet is growing exponentially and as a result of this trend, users will feel information overload.  This has been discussed since the 90’s when there were fewer web pages.

The Web 2.0 trend is a bubble that’s going to burst and be shrunk by users filtering out all the stuff that they don’t want to see or sort through manually.  Just like e-mail spam filters, there will be self-generated filters on the information you search for on the Internet.

Search profiles stored in a search engine that automatically filter your information through a point of view, a set of criteria, your past viewing history or comparing your profile to results others have searched for and viewed (Wisdom of the Crowds).

Even following a single prolific blogger can be hard because everyone is very busy trying to cram more and more into a day.  Internet filters that filter through blog posts and other information will be coming soon.  And it will be delivered to the user like RSS feeds work today.

Information retrieval improvements and information filtering will be the next new big thing on the Internet, Web 3.0 if you will.  And boxes instead of rounded corners.

“We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” –Criswell

I bought my wife a 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle a year and a half ago.  I have a fourth generation 20 gigabyte iPod that I constantly add and remove music on and take time to select what music/artist/album I want to hear.  I also have created a vast network of playlists that coordinate to load the iPod with music.

Recently, I used the iPod Shuffle when mowing.  I loaded it up with a playlist and listened to it with the songs playing randomly.  It felt so nice to just listen to whatever came up.  I was like freedom, freedom from deciding what music I was in the mood for.

This experience made me think of a book I’d read about, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz.  The choice of deciding what to listen to can sometimes be paralyzing because I have so many choices.  Using the iPod Shuffle takes away the overwhelming choices that Schwartz discusses in his book.

I think this applies to health care also.  There are overwhelming treatment options for conditions and making the best decision can be difficult especially because it is a critical choice.  In the health care world, many (most?) patient rely on their family practice physician to guide them.  I know I do.  That physician helps the patients by narrowing their choices in selecting treatments by recommending the best options.  Just like the iPod Shuffle does about music selection.

Google Health is live and looking good. I’ll be playing around with it for a bit.

One of my favorite opening paragraphs, forget that, favorite quotes is from William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand- loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.

In VB.NET one of the most common ways I like to go low-tek is to use HTML items instead of .NET controls. Why use a .NET link to go to a page when a regular old HTML 4.01 one will work?

Why use a complicated hi-tek solution when a low-tek one will work? Try to go as low-tek as you can. Just like the quote says, they won’t expect it.

I recently read an article that reminded me of an episode of “The Office“,  Coming Soon: A Web-Wide Social Network?

While some of the article I agreed with this quote was one that I can’t accept:

“This is huge, the combination of the MySpace, Facebook and Google all saying basically the same thing, which is say that websites can become more interesting and engaging when you add a social layer to them.”

The episode of “The Office” that this reminds me of is the one in which Ryan comes to their office and wants the staff to help input orders because of trouble with the website Ryan wants to work, dundermifflininfinity.com. A brief joke is about how the social networking piece of the website was taken over by some users and it had to be removed.  Part of the joke also is that Ryan added a social networking piece to the website of a paper supplier and who would go there to network.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the clip on youtube to embed it here.

I think there are websites that social networking like those mentioned above would not work on at all, like a paper supplier or a supermarket or a plumbing supply manufacturer or a potato supplier, etc.  People don’t/wouldn’t go to those sites to socialize when they can use Facebook, et al. This idea seems to me to be a Meatball Sundae.

Thanks to Dan for sending the article to me.

Think of this more as me just publicly bookmarking something. I don’t use del.icio.us even though I should.

I recently read this article, The 411 on mobile snap technology, about a mobile phone technology and it made me think about how we could apply this to health care.

I couldn’t think of anything that would fit in with what patients would naturally use.

But we are working on a mobile site that will have scaled down/phone optimized applications that make sense to use on a phone.  We will not be putting the entire eCommunity.com site on this mobile site because it won’t all work effectively on a small screen with a slower bandwidth.

Which is how our team operates.  Instead of rushing to do something cool, we make the technology fit a need to process.  We make the new application fit in our existing structure and make sure it is user friendly.

A good example is our News section on eCommunity.com.  We have news stories that have an RSS feed linked to them all and the monthly news stories also have a podcast feed.  In addition to offering the podcast, we allow the user to listen to an individual story without subscribing to the podcast.

All made as user friendly as possible with explanations of what a RSS feed is.

We also use Feedburner to make the RSS feeds as easy as possible to use for users on any browser.

We added a Google Maps mash-up to our Find a Doctor application because it made sense to do so.

These are all intelligent uses of new technology that are used to benefit the application they are added to.  They were no implemented just because it’s cool and want to build something with it.  Those types of applications will disappear in a few years leaving only the truly useful ones.  Just like what happened with the tech bubble in the 90’s.  The good stuff remained and the bad ideas failed.