ReadWriteWeb/ Alex Iskold

“Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We’re speaking of the contextual user interface.

Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn’t want to deal with anything other than what they were used to…”