Haven’t wrote any­thing for a while, but here’s some food for ran­dom thoughts. With all the newest and great­est hit­ting web namely CSS3 and HTML5, how about giv­ing some love and thoughts to Multi-touch as the next big thing on the web, and prob­a­bly will be Web 3.0? Now you would say some­thing like, “Well, you know Mac­books have that awe­some fea­ture and peo­ple ARE using it on web­sites.” Well, can YOUR web­sites sup­port flip­ping objects around with 2 fin­gers? An inter­face to crop and edit pho­tos using your 2 fingers/hands on your web­site / web app? iPhone / Android phones can, but on web­sites? Nope.

First of all, I am one of those peo­ple who refused to support/buy any­thing with an “i” in front of it, it’s not that one day I wake up and decided to dis­like Macs. I owned an iPod before and I found myself almost throw­ing it against the wall. I have used Macs, and I can’t find myself lik­ing it as much as a PC. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, but I just pre­fer PC’s… that being said, the best thing Apple “invented” and poured so much thoughts into my brain is the lat­est and great­est the Multi-touch technology.

Where did I get the idea Multi-touch will be Web 3.0? Well, Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools, Pro­to­type etc… changed the way peo­ple inter­act with web, and how it deliv­ered inter­ac­tiv­ity and infor­ma­tion to the users. Designers/developers don’t need to depend on Flash/Silverlight to have ani­ma­tions / effects, things load faster in the back­ground or don’t even have to reload a page thanks to AJAX. No longer the user has to open a new win­dow to see a pic­ture, instead, they can see them using a Light­box or sim­i­lar tool. I per­son­ally feel those are the most impor­tant ele­ments that dif­fer­en­ti­ate the good old web from Web 2.0. Some might argue Web 2.0 is all about the shiny graph­ics, but I beg to be dif­fered. Not only that, Multi-touch is already in smart phones and Apple already started it with their Mac­books / Magic Mouse, and Win­dows 7 with their own multi-touch inter­face. It’s only a mat­ter of time when all the web­sites don’t require a mouse to browse and adding more inter­ac­tiv­i­ties, because I don’t have to use a mouse to browse when I use my G1, why should a desk­top com­puter? The tools are already existed to get us there, the ques­tion is how soon. My guess? I’d say in a year.

To prove it, some cra­zies already made one of the world’s first Multi-touch web­site tak­ing advan­tage of Win­dows 7 multi-touch sup­port – of course it still works if you don’t have a fancy multi-touch screen or a Wac­com Bam­boo Touch (cost only $69 and works on both Macs and PCs – yes, even Win XP SP2).  Or a fancy Mac­book / Magic Mouse.

Although, I don’t think I’ll trade my CSS/HTML skills for multi-touch mak­ing web­sites in Sil­verlight. That being said, I think I was look­ing at the future of the web and prob­a­bly some­thing that will “encour­age” CSS3.x / and HTML4.x to sup­port multi-touch sooner, max­i­mize and push the web even fur­ther? Can I already say Multi-Touch Web 3.0, anyone?

A slight prob­lem of course Multi-touch is quite new, not many peo­ple have the tools to inter­act, or the neces­sity for it for the web at least. Never mind that, not a lot of peo­ple get the use of it. Multi-touch took me a few sec­onds to fig­ure out how to use it, now that I know, “wowser” is the word I’m using to describe it. To me, the web is all about two words: infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ence. As designers/developers are con­stantly find­ing bet­ter and cooler way to cre­ate web­sites and deliver infor­ma­tion, Mutli-touch is def­i­nitely the next big thing on the web.

I don’t know about you, but I’m jump­ing on the band­wagon to look for a way to “fake” a Web 2.5 for now and make Web 2.0 sounds so 2008 while peo­ple still dig­ging the glossy/shiny but­tons, and debate the best way to clear floats.

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