David Gelernter: Bring on the 'stream browser'

Close your eyes and look beyond the Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari of today. Do you see a "stream browser"? David Gelernter does.

The Yale computer science professor has been musing about what comes next for all the digital information that swarms and surrounds us, and it has led him to write an op-ed piece on Wired called "The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It." The emphasis in the online time/space continuum, he says, will be shifting from the "space-based web" of the present day to a "time-based worldstream" -- an outgrowth from the "lifestream" phenomenon that Gelernter and Eric Freeman wrote about in the 1990s.

Gelernter argues that we're already in the midst of the shift to a dynamic, diary-like structure -- consider what we have already in the form of RSS feeds, blogs, Facebook's Timeline, Twitter and other "chatstreams" -- that's taking us beyond the flat Earth of the desktop.

"What happens," he posits, "if we merge all those blogs, feeds, chatstreams, and so forth? By adding together every timestream on the net -- including the private lifestreams that are just beginning to emerge -- into a single flood of data, we get the worldstream: a way to picture the cybersphere as a whole."

When that whole other world arrives, it'll be adios to today's oper... [Read more]





by Jonathan Skillings via CNET