By Guest Author, Matt Butcher (@technosophos)

About the author: Matt is a software developer and author living in Chicago. He is the author of five programming books, most recently “Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery” and an Open Source project called QueryPath for PHP that allows developers to easily build applications from XML data with jQuery like functionality.

Matt’s personal blog is at TechnoSophos.com

I saw into the future. At 10:00 AM PDT on October 25th, in a conference room seating 16 people at the Googleplex in Santa Clara, I saw into the future of the web. And it was good.

What I saw was the demise of Web 2.0, a technology grown to capacity. And it is not Web 3.0 (whatever that is) that will take its place. No, tomorrow’s web is about user interfaces.

The weekend of October 24th was the annual Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Mentor Summit at Google’s headquarters. Ostensibly, this is the opportunity for all of the Open Source organizations who participated in GSOC to get together and perform a collective postmortem on the summer’s successes and failures. But anytime such a menagerie of geeks is assembled under one roof, much more is bound to happen.

Unsurprisingly, many of the unconference’s sessions were focused on the GSOC program itself. But a healthy dose of technology centered sessions made their way onto the schedule as well, and the hallway may very well have seen more code than the conference rooms.

Beyond the physical conference space, much was happening in the virtual sphere as well. As a gesture of thanks to the GSOC participants and mentors for a summer of work, Google gave everyone Wave accounts.

Wave’s utility lies in numbers. Signing in without a friend is like throwing a party but inviting nobody. Bring a friend or two into the Wave, and it feels like hosting tea in a room with too much furniture. But once the numbers start to rise, Wave’s strengths surface. It is a cocktail party that comes complete with a birds-eye view of all of the chit-chat. Conversations swirl around, splintering into smaller threads of conversation only to merge back into the main discussion later. Images, maps, polls, and an API for building extensions make Wave a promising tool… except for one thing.

The user interface stinks.

Yes, Wave’s merits surface only when many people are in a discussion. Unfortunately, that’s also where the big shortcomings surface. As one conversation forks into many smaller discussions, the wave quickly becomes visually unmanageable. The Quickest Scrollwheel in the West will still have a hard time traversing the continuously growing vertical pane that wraps the conversation. The entire advantage gained by the “birds eye view” of the conversation is lost to clumsy scrolling.

But this failing is indicative of something greater. Once again, Google has achieved an engineering masterpiece. And for all technical purposes, Wave is a marvel. It certainly pushes AJAX and asynchronous web interaction to its very limits, and I have no doubt that the source code for the server component would make my head swim. But the user interface, for all its visual business, simply doesn’t work. Wave is an attempt to cram the internals of a Hummer into the body of a circa 1996 Honda Civic.

This is where the Mentor Summit offered a revelation.

On the second day of the summit, the PyMT team hosted an hour-long session on multi-touch input. PyMT is a set of Python application bindings for various multi-touch libraries. Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multi-touch input technologies. Last week, Apple’s new Magic Mouse made its debut featuring a multi-touch surface atop a traditional laser-based mouse. Dell offers a laptop with a multi-touch screen. Wacom offers a multi-touch tablet. Microsoft’s Surface technology boasts table-sized multi-touch surfaces.

Multi-touch is arriving in a big way. But what’s the hubub about? What’s the big feature that suddenly makes these technologies attractive? It is the extension of “point and click” to “touch, tap, pinch, swipe, expand, drag, rotate, throw…”. The simple mouse model that has driven graphical interaction for decades is mid-way through an extreme makeover. And with deflection- and pressure-sensing surfaces rapidly advancing, mice and fingers are just the tip of the input iceberg.

The PyMT team took an hour-long trip to Google’s hands-on room and came back with an impressive demonstration. Beginning with some Lego pieces, a flat sheet of metal, and a PlayStation 3 camera, the pair of programmers from PyMT built a gaming surface and a couple of paddles. The camera tracked the motion of the paddles on the surface, transforming the physical paddles into virtual ones in a game of Pong projected onto the wall. In an hour!

When we can build new input devices with an Open Source library and $35 worth of corner-drug-store toys, a whole new universe of possibilities appears.

And that’s where Wave returns to mind. As I walked out of the room with UX Design guru Steve Fisher, he turned to me an remarked, “When I watch a demo like this, it makes me wonder… What is the Web going to look like in a few years.” Yeah, it makes me wonder, too.

Wave is a fantastic architecture. But the architectural gems are obscured behind yesterday’s user interface limitations. In that way, Wave is a milestone that marks the death of Web 2.0. And it is more than that. It’s a fingerpost pointing not to the technologies touted as Web 3.0, but toward a new mode of human-computer interaction. What is going to make tomorrow’s web compelling? Not metadata. Not cleaner layout. Not even native support for videos. Better user interfaces. Interfaces tuned to convey information more effectively. Reactive interfaces. That’s where tomorrow’s success stories are waiting.

HTML 5 and RDFa are good and all, but the real sea-change is coming from your fingertips. All ten of them.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Tags: Drupal Developer , Google Summer of Code , Googleplex , GSOC , Javascript , jQuery , Matt Butcher , Mentor Summit , multi-touch , Panlantir , PyMT , QueryPath , web 2.0 demise