From hunt-and-pecking to browsing the WWW

Playing around with a lot of different Firefox plugins over the last few days, I have come to realize that the way we consume Internet content has been undergoing a change. What had been targeted fishing for small fish  in the huge information ocean, has now been transformed into whale like soaking. Instead of searching from a vantage point for well defined prey, we just swallow tons of water into us and hope to find some nutrition in it.

Streams of information are the product of social networks and recommender systems. What begins as a small creek, a twitter status update for instance, accumulates to streams, rivers and oceans. Trough the act of consuming those information streams our surfing behavior is changed. We click on links to sites we never would have visited, google for things that we never heart of, and subscribe to even more information streams we didn't even know existed.

Twitter is just one example. Take all this other stuff we are fed with every day: Facebook, Stumbler, Delicious, Last.Fm, Glued, ... All those applications generate endless information rugs that we wade through with our personal quivers. And at the end of the day we come home with new catches of internet addresses and content pieces.

Why did I mention the Firefox plugins? Having installed extensions for many of the social network sites mentioned I find myself more than often not using the address bar to navigate to a certain site. Instead I just follow the latest tweets or hit a key combination to stumble over new information; and if it's delicious I might put it in my Facebook for every one else to browse.