techno.blog("Dion")

We invited Aza Raskin to talk on the death of the desktop at The Ajax Experience, and it went down very well.

Google brought him in last week to discuss this topic more, and has posted the talk (inline below).

These are fun topics to think about… not only how to make your work usable today, but how to think about the future.

When I think about the zoom metaphor, and how we need to do a better job with space so our users can easily take search and navigation to make the optimal experience, I think about how sites such as iGoogle could be poised to be there.

Aza shows a demo of his Zoom work where you can obviously zoom in and out to find your data. The objects are real. You see a hyperlink and you can zoom in to see the page itself. You don’t need to go somewhere else.

iGoogle can be the jumping off point. Already I have portlets that surface high level content such as feeds with the Google Reader gadget, maps, Gmail, etc. These are the high level view, and I can click through to zoom in.

Right now this is a primitive process, but you could see how it could be expanded to be more of Aza’s vision.