Catching up with the future

Chances are that you still keep track of your favourite websites using bookmarks or by typing the address into your browser. While the more tech-savvy have used a variety of techniques, such as RSS "headline readers" to have information come to them instead of constantly going to retrieve it, mainstream users are unlikely to have tried anything more than signing up for an e-mail newsletter.

That's beginning to change. At the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, recently, it has become clear that platforms and networks will soon become more important than websites for sharing all kinds of information. One example comes from Digg, the social news aggregation website that allows users to upload links to interesting stories that they've seen anywhere on the web and then creates a front page based on votes, or "Diggs", from users. Digg plans a relaunch over the next few months that will turn it from a website into, in the words of its chief executive Jay Adelson, "a services layer — and the first app on it is the new Digg".

The idea of a "services layer" is more than jargon. It means providing the infrastructure that will allow people to upload stories to Digg without even visiting the site. They'll be able to do it without even having a Digg account — accounts with other sites, such as Twitter or Facebook, will work.

The service will even allow anonymous submissions.

When people visit the website, they will find not one main page but many smaller ones. If you're interested in, say, cricket, you'll be able to go to Digg's topic page and find stories about the topic from right across the web. Unlike a Google search, these articles will be selected and curated by a knowledgeable community.

This idea of interacting with the website without visiting it was echoed in Twitter's announcement of its new @anywhere service.

Evan Williams, Twitter's chief executive, said @anywhere would allow people to log in to websites using their Twitter account, or to view, for instance, a newspaper columnist's Twitter profile without leaving the newspaper site and give publishers the opportunity to recommend lists of Twitter accounts.

Others have been developing similar services. Facebook Connect, for instance, allows users to log in to third-party websites using their Facebook identity. They can then feed their interactions with these sites back to their friends on Facebook.

Google has tried something similar with Buzz, a service that lets Gmail users share links, pictures and status updates within their mail service.

However, where Google ran into trouble was in creating an opt-out service, in which users were included by default unless they chose to cancel. Google knew it needed a critical mass of users to make the service work but many saw the opt-out approach as an invasion of privacy. Gowalla, which won the mobile category at the SXSW Interactive awards, uses your mobile phone to discover your location and then tells you which of your friends are nearby. It doesn't yet have the huge uptake needed to make it genuinely useful.

Know where everybody is

Your friends probably aren't on it, at least not yet. Still, even if you don't know anyone using Gowalla, it can take you on guided tours, asking you to "check-in" to places of interest and then awarding a badge if you complete the tour. Users can contribute their own tours, too, perhaps recommending local cafés or a walking route. It's only a matter of time before other types of content can be organised based on your location too.

One way of growing the network is to bring in not just friends but also friends of friends.

That's the approach taken by Aardvark, which won the community category at the SXSW Interactive awards. Aardvark has a website and a mobile app and promises to find answers to your questions by asking your social network. By finding someone in the network likely to be able to help, Aardvark can answer questions that would stump an ordinary search engine and it can do so surprisingly quickly. The service was started by former Google employees, and Google recently bought it for a reported $50 million (Dh183 million).

The ability to deliver news, updates and important information without you having to go to a website or without you even knowing that you needed it, has been around for a while.

What's new is that those technologies are now being used to deliver compelling services that could move beyond the technology sector and into well the mainstream.