Web Browsing in 3D

Everything else is available in 3D (movies, televisions, the real world), so why not 3D browsing?  I recently came across this demo video of a 3D browsing experience created using WebGL, HTML5, Javascript and the Mozilla Audio API.  Is this the future of Web browsing?

I’m not extremely fluent in all of these technologies (for more info, see Flight of the Navigator), but as a demo, this is pretty impressive.  To me, it looks a little like Second Life with tons of screens out to the internet.  In other words, slick and different, but I’m not sure how useful, or even how truly integrated this experience would be.  Would you rather navigate to different places on the Web by moving through a 3D space or by Ctrl-Tabbing to the next open tab in your browser?  Maybe I’m old-school, but the latter seems far easier to me.

Of course, there are lots of other demos posted online and it will be interesting to see where this goes.  Checking your favorite Twitter feeds in-game would certainly blur the line between the gaming experience and the real world, but is this necessary?  Probably not, but maybe that’s not the question to be asking with whiz-bang technology like this.  It certainly opens up interesting avenues for the greater integration of a wide range of technologies.  Where that takes us will be interesting to see.

Del.icio.us links

The ubiquitous del.icio.us icon.

I discovered Del.icio.us a while ago (back when http://del.icio.us was a clever URL — before it became delicious.com,) and maybe you did too.  Recently, I’ve found it more and more useful.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool.  Instead of storing your bookmarks in your browser, you save them to this website.  Simple enough.  The first advantage (and the reason I first moved my bookmarks to del.icio.us) is that everything becomes centralized.  I used to bookmark things at home that I needed at work and vice versa.  No longer.

Also, if you use the Firefox browser, you can get the del.icio.us add-on which adds buttons to your browser for one-touch bookmarking.  Click the tag button and bookmark a webpage, add tags to help you find your bookmark, and share it or keep it private, your choice.  Sharing bookmarks brings up a third advantage of this service: vetted links!

Do a search for a topic on del.icio.us and you can see how many people have bookmarked each search result.  Sure, this can be ‘gamed‘ just like Google searches have been.  But, when Google is just taking me to spam, I find del.icio.us searches can be surprisingly helpful.  If a couple of hundred people have bookmarked it, it’s probably worth checking out.

Finally, there is the untapped potential of del.icio.us.  At least, it’s untapped by me.  Linkrolls can be created (for a blog like this one, say) so that links are automatically updated and sorted by del.icio.us.  I could list my latest links, links I’ve tagged with ‘esltech’ or ‘blog’ etc.  Very interesting oppotunity of which I have yet to avail myself.  But, at least you have something to look forward to if you keep reading.