Relax. Soon you can let Siri do it for you...

Nowhere to go, nowhere to flee, we've landed @Dawn of 21stcentury.

I just really felt like writing that down..

..anyway, I remember back in 1994, a beautiful day at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, I was accessing 'the web' by using things like Gopher. Then came the Christmas holidays, and when I came back on Monday January 2 1995, this icon had been added to the windows 3.1 desktop >> Netscape!

I could hardly believe it, this whole 'website thing'. Pictures on which you could click and then off you were, to the next website..., amazing it was.

Now, over a decade later, the web has definitely developed nicely and we are currently blessed with browsers such as IE, Firefox and Chrome.

Now the intriguing question to me: what's next? Well, maybe Siri is. It represents a new interaction paradigm for the consumer internet experience (as they put it themselves). You see, in the past 5 years over 200 million dollars has been put in this government-backed research project called CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). Some elements of the developed technology will now be commercially exploited by means of Siri. The idea being that the Internet has become way too complex for the average user and that we need a new way of interacting with the web by means of an intelligent interface.

News like this is food for fantasy to me. I am very curious how browsers/access interfaces will develop over time. For now we'll have to wait though. Siri will be available in a public beta in the first half of 2009. You can sign up here.