Something big may be happening to user experience.  Bing and Google will soon be showing tweets as part of the search results (they have both licensed the full Twitter firehose and Marissa Meyer yesterday demoed a version of “Social Search”).  Google is already returning videos from Youtube as search results and apparently will soon be offering music.  Bing video results can be played right on the results page.  Facebook just announced music gifts that can be played right inside of the news feed and wall.  All of these might simply be seen as UI affordances, but I am wondering whether this is a trend that will ultimately result in a convergence of user experience.

For some time now we have taken tree like navigation as a given for the web user experience, with the root of the tree being search.  But as you click on results, the experience can be jarring as a single click transports you into a completely different color scheme, layout and set of capabilities.  If you don’t find what you are looking for you hit “back” and try again with a similar potential for disruption.  Put differently, the web experience is “site centric” as opposed to “user centric."  This matters very little when you are exploring and discovering – in fact it is part of the fun of doing so.  But it matters a lot when you are just trying to get stuff done.

The reason I put a "re” in front of convergence in the title of this post is that of course the early walled gardens, such as AOL provided a converged user experience.  Now it seems like we might be headed back there but built on top of APIs and through partnerships.  One place where that is most likely to happen is mobile as the overhead of switching there is even bigger (e.g. on iPhone quit one app and start another).  On the web right now this might seem to shape up as a fight between the “big guys” (Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google), but I know of at least one startup that is trying to provide a “neutral” play here – you can try it out at kikin.com.