The Tap Web

I've grown accustomed to the iPhone's Safari Touch browser, such that I find myself irritated when I can't use the double-tap-to-zoom-in technique on my desktop browsers.

Web pages are rarely organized with reading content as the sole priority. Content is a hook to expose you to links to even more articles, all of which contain ads. Indeed, on many web sites, consideration for the reader seems to be at the bottom of a very long priority list.

It's not hard to understand why. Readers expect a bottomless supply of written content at no cost. Someone needs to foot the bill, and advertisers are willing. Maximizing advertising means maximizing reader exposure to in-site material, and most readers are not going to look for more content unless their interest is actively tickled.

The end result is a web full of sidebars and banners only a circus promoter could love. I'm not even talking about the ads themselves, obnoxious though they can be. I'm talking about the intra-site promotions with busy layouts and in your face color schemes, crammed together in such a way as to make one think the world's white space supply ran out. Not that the ads are delightful, either.

Double Tap turns the situation significantly in favor of the user. Tap-Tap, and the website effluvia vanishes. All I see is The Article. No sidebars, no promos, no feature pimping, no widgets. Just the Thing I Came For. And once I've zoomed on my target, it's not like I'm going to zoom back out to See More Stuff. When I'm done, I'm done.

The experience is so different, it's like a different web altogether, the Double Tap Web. The thing is, all the concerns that led to the current situation on the Normal Web can be appeased on the Tap Web without the pain points.

The goal of information-based websites is simple: Be of interest to the reader, expose the reader to advertising, interest the reader in more content. Repeat.

The Tap Web can support ads. Anything can support ads. The Tap Web also supports self-promotion. At the end of the article, show me a list of related content that might be of interest. This technique is especially effective, because by reading a particular article, the reader has self-identified their interests, making it easier to target both ads and further content.

A site that has been particularly successful for me this way is Zen Habbits. I queued up a dozen articles just by jumping from one recommended link to the next. Call it the YouTube effect. Post-roll is a great place to put links. It's right when and where I'm open to something else to read.

If you aren't convinced, swap "The Tap Web" for "The RSS Web". If anything, Double Tap on the iPhone lets readers arbitrarily insert the user experience of an RSS aggregator into any web page. The difference being RSS is still catching on among non-techies, whereas the potential market for The Tap Web is iPod users. In other words, everybody.

If Apple plans on pushing the iPod Market in an iPod Touch/iPhone direction, and there can be no doubt this is the plan, millions of web readers will be viewing our web pages through a Tap-shaped lens. Which means millions of readers will be able to switch off our obnoxious promotion schemes.

And note that the ability to do so is nothing new. We the power users have been able to shape our web experience for a long time. The difference is that not only will general users have this ability, but in the context of a touch device, such ability will be necessary to even use the web. In short, users will be blocking our web administrative artifacts as a matter of survival.

I can't help wondering how great the regular web would be if it more closely resembled the Tap Web. In the least, I'd like to see an acceptance in major websites that while intra-site promotion is necessary for business, there's no reason this experience has to be so hostile to the reader. Too many links dilutes the value of each link.

Indeed, it may be that a more focused strategy to site promotion will lead to more internal reading, not less, and thus stronger attraction for advertisers. Especially if said readers are strongly targeted. More customers works as a strategy, but so do better customers.

Boon or boondoggle, the Tap Web is coming. Now would be a good time to think about how tap-friendly our sites are.