Another datapoint. Man After Man, by Dougal Dixon, is a book a cousin of mine had when I was a kid. Whenever I was over her house, I’d dig it out to read and look at the pictures. The illustrations are tremendous.

The premise: Over the next two million years, how does Man – Homo sapiens – change and evolve through deliberate genetic modification and evolution after global catastrophes? It gets pretty crazy but it’s all good fun.

It’s also the kind of premise I want to explore with web apps.

I think people tend to forget the impact the naming of “web apps” had on the web back in 1999. Previously the web was about information navigation—hypertext with some forms thrown in. But with the naming of “web apps” we realised that we were building applications. A revelation! Okay, there was no drag-and-drop, no menus, and the widgets were useless… but we could start thinking about applications that did things and had state and preferences and a UI and all the rest.

Naming the genre of web apps created the focus that opened up a swathe of development, the culmination of which I think we’re seeing now, with Web 2.0.

The thing about web apps, which I remember from conversations at the time, is that they could have happened at any time since the beginning of the web (which even at the time felt a long time ago). We were using the same tools. All that had happened was that a consensus formed around a particular design pattern – a genre – and that was the boost everything needed. Frameworks were created, finer-grain patterns formed, new business founded. And so on.

But that was 7 years ago. Now web apps have ripened, I want to know what will happen next. In the spirit of Man After Man, what apps will follow our present-day web apps?

And following the lead of how web apps emerged in the first place, I don’t want to consider apps being built by huge companies with access to technology out of the hands of you and me, the grass roots. I’m going to consider technologies that are in our hands or very almost, and put forward future web app archetypes that could be built by all of us, not just a select few.

For each of the future web apps, I’ve picked an illustration of a future Homo sapiens from the book. Unfortunately it’s not on sale anymore but I managed to find this one second-hand.

Matt Webb, S&W, posted 2006-09-21 (talks on 2006-09-03, 2006-09-17)