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In web application design there are two distinct philosophies that I want to compare. Theories, that over the last several years, have made up a large portion of the “Web 2.0” products that have made it to market.

Looked at (very) broadly, I would call these two models the Algorithm and the Crowd theories of development.

Two Paths

Those who subscribe to the first, believe that the algorithm is king and that human beings are, on our best days, flawed, imprecise and random. To find accurate information quickly, it’s the algorithm and the algorithm alone that must extract the best elements of human decision making and create a mathematical model from them, but just as importantly, it’s the algorithm that must limit humanities ability to game the system and keep the whims of the crowd from sullying the system’s core functionality.

Amongst the second class of developers, the class that I am calling the Crowd theorists, human beings are everything. If you want to know the answer to a question, don”t look to the software, instead ask more people. If you need to understand any concept, any data set, any idea, don’t look to the machine to help you decide — instead, poll the collective.

For those who believe in the algorithm, technology becomes a Grecian Oracle, ineffable in its decision making, coldly accurate but ultimately impersonal. Applications are tools to query, not to converse with. A world of algorithms is a world of brilliant black boxes, a world where our sole job is to provide tasks for our infallible software to solve, and the leading edge of information technology is software that solves these tasks better.

In the other world, in the world of the crowd, software is exclusively a conduit for human thought. We ask nothing of it because it can provide nothing for us. Software exists as a channel through which our lives can be parsed, packaged and delivered to anyone, anywhere on the planet. We build software not to overcome our weaknesses but to “heighten” our realities, and the leading edge of innovation isn’t that which solves problems, but instead that which lets us spread our thoughts over a wider area.

Another Way?

While there is room in the world for applications that focus exclusively on the either algorithm or the crowd, my question is, “which path is the future?”

My answer is that we believe that software is stale, that innovation is dead, that the Social Web is just a crowded hall of echoes because we rarely create anything in the space where the Algorithm and the Crowd meet.

Software that isn’t just a black box with all the answers, but an agent to actively find the answer those questions too mundane for us to look for ourselves.

Software that isn’t just a dumb conduit for all information, but a filter that learns from us and actively works to make sure that the information that gets through is what we really want to see.

Well over 40 years of research has gone into pattern recognition, machine learning, expert systems and artificial intelligence and yet we have never seen true expressions of these technologies in consumer web applications. All the pieces are there. The only thing missing now is the vision and the right questions. I think it’s about time we start looking for them.

There is no clear victor in the fight between the Algorithm and the Crowd, nor should there be.

They both are only pieces of the puzzle. In the final tally, the web that will touch the lives of the mainstream will be the one that combines these two concepts seamlessly. A web where applications stop being toys that we use or don’t as the fashion suits us, and start being tools that accentuate our strengths and smooth out our weaknesses.

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