Now that Microsoft has released a Surface based computer, I thought it was time that I thought about how people would actually use the thing. Sure the examples of moving pictures around and finger painting are kind of neat, but how does it get people to information?

Some of the things that immediately came to my mind have included:

• AJAX or some derivative will rule because people will want to be able to move things around.
• One improvement will have to be the ability to [easily] rotate & resize objects & pan around a page.
• Thoughts about multiple-user access — how do you create web/internet spaces that multiple people will use?

The actual implications of a surface-based design are interesting, but here is my addition to the conversation. What about a kind of RSS-feed “lazy susan”? Here is a quick draft of a possible design.

So, you have that coffee table going on and you are reading the news with your friends. You all want to share the same news. So, here is a way to do it with the new interface. Maybe you would want to combine this with my Ajax-based federated search tool. So you search on one topic and it covers a whole lot of news that a bunch folks can go through and search, discover or whatever with your friends on the topic!

This sounds like a great opportunity for libraries if there ever was one. John Blyberg seems to agree. I think libraries should start imagining right now what the future of public internet access will look like in the next 5 years.