Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet.
We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine
an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content.
But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs.
There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop
application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place
to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface
in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn't want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.

Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Users are not
stupid, and in fact, they were overwhelmed with choices presented in trad