Web Science, texting, and creative misuse

You'd have thought that, having invented it, Tim Berners-Lee would know how the web worked. The Web Science project he wants to launch will study the World Wide Web, how it's working and what's being done with it. This might sound a bit pointless -- surely he just has to look at the web to see what people are using it for? -- but Berners-Lee has a very good point: there are so many different things being done on the web, in so many different ways, that it's difficult to tell what works and what doesn't. None of this is anything to do with the W3C's traditional area of markup languages, protocols and specifications; it's about the human aspect of the web.

The technology that makes the web possible is deliberately simple, open and flexible. This gave it a low barrier to entry -- particularly compared with Ted Nelson's stillborn Project Xanadu -- and meant that people were able to run in all directions with it. It also meant it was impossible to keep track of what applications people used it for. Sure, most people creating the web know how a web site works, but ask them and chances are they'll start talking about HTML.

It's important for anyone creating an information system -- even those that don't involve "computers" -- to realise that people aren't going to use it in the way you intended, and they're even going to use it in ways that never crossed your mind. A prime example of this is the Short Message Service on mobile phones. This was added to the GSM standard, almost as an afterthought, with applications like voicemail notifications and telemetry in mind. Had you told the engineers responsible that years later SMS would be used by skool kdz txtN ea othR 2 sA SUL, I imagine they'd have been horrified. Why go to all that bother, when you can use the same piece of equipment to just talk to each other?

We're an inventive species. Our ability to take something designed as a tool for one thing, and turn it into a tool for something else is how we make progress much of the time. For this to be truly successful, we should take the time to look back at ourselves to see where we're doing this well, and where it's not going so great.