Jeremy Zawodny put up an interesting post about the future of portals. Specifically, he asks the question What will the next generation portal look like?, along with making some other comments which I won’t repeat. If you haven’t read the post, read it now. I’ll wait.

Ok, so I’m no visionary, and I won’t try to answer the question because I know I can’t. But I have a couple of ideas regarding what will influence the answer.

The nature of available information

The first that springs to mind is that in most cases, the information you’re looking for can be phrased, or encoded as a one-line input string. Whether it’s a traditional web search, a product search or something like Google’s ability to perform calculations, a person can usually find a way to express what they’re looking for in a single line. Until Jeremy pointed out that this is how Google tries to interface with the world, I hadn’t given it much thought. But it makes sense now.

In fact, something I find myself doing where possible is using a single-line search box for whatever it is I’m looking for. Case in point: Yahoo’s finance page. If you’re looking for today’s US Dollar-to-Euro conversion rate, you can surf through their site, find the appropriate page, select the amount of currency you want to convert, select both the source and destination currencies from their combo boxes and then hit search. I use the lesser-known version: go to the finance page and in the stock symbol search box, enter USDEUR=X and search. Using the Google toolbar, multiply the resulting value by the amount you want and you’re done.

You’ll notice two flaws. The first is that this is not publicised anywhere, or at least it’s not immediately obvious. The second is that the search string is cryptic (why the “=X” at the end? What if I don’t know the official abbreviation for the Nepalese Yak?) and even then you have to externally multiply the result by whatever you wanted to convert in the first place. Cumbersome. Google, on the other hand, lets youperform very similar queries, although converting standard units andnot financial information, as a single line. As an example, try tosearch for 300 metres in yards.

There are two points to this example. The first is that a complicatedinterface can easily be reduced to a single query that someone with aprogrammer mentality can understand. The second is that this same interfacecan be simplified further into a question anybody could ask. For as long asthis is true, the one-line search input box will be king.

I’m of the opinion that there’s still at least a good two or three yearsleft in this paradigm, as search engines start to understand the conceptand start reducing their interfaces to the bare minimum. There is stillample room for improvement, as exemplified bythe number of steps you have to go through to get to a street map herein Spain. On any one of the sites I’ve visited, first you have to selectyour province, then the town in that province, and only then can youinput the address you’re looking for (in three different boxes, onefor street type, one for street name and one for street number).

It’s much easier to just write in an address as found on any scrap of paper.The technology exists to process this and with the addition of a little artificial intelligence in the form of spell-checking and other modern conveniences, you can probably hack up a decent parser for this in a couple of weeks.

Getting back to the topic on hand, I think that the portal of the futurewill fit into whatever is easier to find the information we want or needin the future. Ok, I know I’m not really saying anything here, but Ido think that the only way interfaces will change is if the nature ofthe information they access also changes. I don’t think access to currentinformation can be optimized much beyond the single input box.

The nature of input devices

Maybe I’ve been reading Russell Beattie’s blog too much, but I do think that the next majorstep towards information gathering and retrieval, as well as servicesrendered, will be making them available on mobile devices. Maybe notcellphones, although it looks likely at the moment, but somehow peoplewill expect access to information anywhere.

This is partly covered by the previous point, since the information you want or needwhile sitting at home is not necessarily the same as the information you wantor need while waiting to board a plane or catch a bus. However, there is anotherfactor that could influence the interaction between a user and a portal.

As the subtitle subtly hints, I’m talking about input devices - the wayyou enter data into your mobile device. If you’ve tried to fill inan online form with a cellphone, you know what I’m talking about. Even one-lineforms are a pain. There has to be a better way.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what that way is. I do think that it won’tbe anything that tries to emulate a keyboard (like some nokia “messagingphones”), and I don’t think it lies with voice-recognition or withalternative input methods that have been around for a long time, likecertain chording keyboards. In fact, I doubt it will be anything likewhat we do on a keyboard.

Once this method is invented and common, then we’ll start seeing portalsmade to be used with it. Again, I have no idea what that might be like,but we haven’t seen it yet.

And now, we wait…

So that’s my opinion. I think that nothing will change until there is apowerful reason to do so, and that this reason will be the change inavailable information and the change in the way we look for it. There’snot much we can do now but wait. Maybe somewhere, there’s somethinginteresting in alpha…

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