Joseph Essas, the blog…

Over the last couple of years there has been tremendous push to present information in visually appealing way. All new technologies like AJAX, Flash, WEB 2.0 web services etc, are all trying to address this in various forms. I think Google was really an early adopter of this trend, despite that Search is purely text based. AdWords was brilliant in a way it allowed advertisers to manage their campaigns through AJAX interfaces. Gmail took email to the next level in terms of ease of access to your emails, which is part of visual presentation, in my mind.
Google Earth, Google maps are other examples of presenting information in much more appealing way. Recent acquisition of Gapminder also points in the same direction.

However, the web is still a very textual environment. But all recent trends point out that new generation of users is looking for much more than just text. Youtube, Myspace are all examples of that. Explosion of Photo management sites like Flickr, slideshows online like slide.com are all attempts to visualize users life, and present it for quick consumption.

I think the next evolution of the Web will be around connecting visualization dots across the web, and automated ways to present information in visual ways.