The You-Centric Web

Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs recently gave a keynote at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. His talk is centered around the future of the web and what he coins as a “you-centric” web experience.

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

“The matching of content (nouns) to services (verbs), and services to content in the next big business model of the web.”

In his presentation Raskin says that the 3 pillars of the future web browser are identity, social and data. He discusses how the web has changed from 4 or 5 years ago into what it is today and how the web nowadays is fundamentally more social.

One of his ideas is having a browser that knows the identity of the user – a browser that knows their friends, credit card information, and communication preferences (i.e. messaging via twitter if it’s a twitter friend). He talks about the work they are doing at Mozilla with Weave and Ubiquity and gives shout outs to Google Wave and IE’s web-accelerators. He says the future of the web will also be task-centric. You should type what you want to do, instead of trying to look-up how to do it.

Raskin says that a user’s friends are too valuable for any one vendor or company to control them. He envisions a browser that scrapes the internet, aggregating and saving data relevant to the user.

Overall the video is an interesting watch, but his ideas are not that forward thinking. Much of what he talks about is currently being developed by big players in the web browsing world. I fully expect his ‘Future of Web Browsing” to be common place in the next few years.