MAC addresses are stratified by IP addresses. IP addresses are stratified by domain names. Domain names are stratified by search. But does it stop there?

Humans don’t have a part of their brain labelled “address bar” or “search box” (even in those quaint old phrenology skulls). Each of these approaches have emerged to mask the complexity of the layer beneath.

Humans will divine the easiest way to their goal. In the context of mobile web discovery, I believe the obvious goal is to go beyond textual search at all.

Jaiku? Twitter? SMS? These are cool tricks, but merely add syntactic extensions to the current search paradigm.

And voice-based search will surely be a great leap forward (and slightly easier than telepathy).

But no-one’s quite figured out what can be done with a combination of contextual variables (location + presence + state-of-mind + weather …) to create some sort of predictive discovery.

Please try to guess what I am looking for before I even open the browser.

Early evening? My friends have downloaded a certain artist’s warm-up track? Predict it for me too. After-hours, you see I’m headed home? Predict a down-tempo compilation similar to the one I listened to last Saturday.

You know it is raining, that I am outside and moving slowly, and that my next appointment is far away and soon? I shouldn’t even *have* to tell you that when I state “Taxi”, I mean neither the Scorcese film or the Vanessa Paradis track.

In fact, when I even open my phone, you should have a tel: link ready to go. Hell, why not even dial it for me. “Mr Pearce? Your cab, courtesy of Taptu”.

I guess none of this requires any technology not available today - but also I suspect this wasn’t quite what you had in mind