After my rant yesterday, I’m realizing how incredibly close we are to significantly greater capability to have we run-of-the-mill, non-programmers assemble and deliver our own rich internet applications.
Remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Everyone always points to the RFID-like recognition the advertisement had of him as he ran from the cops (the ad greeted him by name). What I recall is when he was researching data in real-time by manipulating it in space with his hands. THAT is what I hope to have next year: a page layout-like ability to place images, text, and chunks of functionality into a seamless whole.
Let’s take a look at where we are right now:
- Portal applications like Pageflakes, NetVibes, Protopage and others allow drag-n-drop of RSS-fed news and content as well as nice chunks of functionality like weather, time, search, movie listings and more. These are primarily personal portals…though Pageflakes allows the assemblage of public pages
- Widgets and Gadgets are exploding in number and functionality. Widgetbox and Google Gadgets are the two most prominent, non-desktop (like Yahoo Widgets or Apple’s Dashboard Widgets) pieces of functionality that a user could assemble on to a page, blog, or site
- Mashups are exploding in popularity. I haven’t checked until this evening (received an email from a friend exploring building a mashup application) and I was stunned with the huge array of them at ProgrammableWeb.
All of this is made possible by the accelerating number of Web-based, hosted applications that have exposed their inner workings with an Application Programming Interface (API).
What’s missing from all of this?
Steve’s Social Stuff