David Pogue’s post about seeing Jeff Han’s latest presentation of his multi-touch technology at TED got me thinking. When multi-touch becomes standard, how will it transform wiki collaboration? For one, imagine a gesture that allows you to move individual words around to rearrange a sentence. Another gesture could allow you to select an entire sentence, or paragraph, and move it.

But those only pertain to an individual editor. Working with multiple editors, especially simultaneously, is where it gets really interesting. For multiple editors working in the same room, Multi-touch could allow them to look at the wiki on a very large screen (50-60″) and edit by touching the screen to rearrange content, using a gesture to set an edit point, then a keyboard to enter text. For people not working in such close proximity, each person could have a color, and when they select text it’s highlighted in that color so others looking at the page at the same time know who has selected it. When text is moved, animation of the movement similar to the kind of 3d response seen on the iPhone will allow people to see the text as it’s rearranged.

Multi-touch has the potential to change the wiki interface even further – imagine if a person can use a gesture to put two pages side-by-side, then move content from one to another. This could render the traditional method of copy and paste with menu commands or keyboard shortcuts obsolete. Multi-touch will definitely make the wiki more engaging and participatory for people working together on a wiki.

Further Reading:

• Touchscreen technology gets cool, thanks to the iPhone
• Multi-Touch Interaction Research – Jeff Han’s website