These days we are strugling to cope with a huge stream of emails, twitters, rss feeds, instant messages, pokes, voip calls or whatever else is out there to catch your attention. We are overwhelmed and overfed by all these streams of information crossing the web and hitting our consiousness. How can your boss's important email make it past the junk in your inbox? How can you tell this instant message is important and needs immediate attention? How would you know that a certain email refers to a recent blog entry? How about creating a visual interface to make sense of all these message and information streams?

We could perhaps think of the web as a soup pot. As heat is applied to the bottom of the pot, pieces of carrot and meat rise to the surface. This process is chaotic and dependent on how different substances absorb and loose heat and how large the pieces are. We only percieve the pieces that float on top. The stuff in the middle or at the bottom is invisable.
The question is, how do we get the best pieces to float to the top?

In modern aviation, pilots and air-traffic controllers also have to cope with a huge stream of information. One of the methods to do this is to apply color structure and color coding to complex information displays.
I am proposing to apply the same sort of design techniques to the web.

This is what the visual interface could look like:
The idea is that a piece of information that requires your attention would come floating on top, thus catching your eye. Imagine a cloud of floating and moving icons, each representing a specific piece of information. The shape of the icon would represent the stream of information: email, twitter, rss or whatever. Colors would indicate certain assocations. For instance, an email and an instant message on the same subject would share the same color. Or perhaps all your boss's messages would turn bright red. The size and the place of the icon would determine it's importance. Icons would float to the surface and then slowly sink to the bottom again, to disappear if they are ignored. An advanced analysis should determine how close to the surface an icon would float. In other words: the application would determine how much your attention is required and then place the icon accordingly within your attention range.
When hovering over an icon, the content of the icon is shown: the email message, the blog entry or anything else. This would be a preview. To reply to the email, you're sent to your email client. To read the full blog entry you're sent to your web browser. The visual interface wouldn't be a browser nor an email client. But it would provide you with a serene yet intelligible view on all your information streams.