So Time named you the Person of the Year. Congratulations. Something to do with Web 2.0 wasn't it? Well you needn't get a swelled head about it because your web services still treat you like a second class citizen - "register over here", "login over there", "submit this way", "subscribe that way", "drag a bookmarklet", "install an add-on".
Huh? Excuse me? Don't you know who I am? Didn't you get the memo? I am the Person of the Year you ignormaus!! Don't you realize that the web revolves around me? (now hold that thought)
Answer me this - how many of today's web apps require full interactivity all of the time? Isn't it true that most are jumped-up editors? Blogging (TypePad), email (Gmail), calendaring (30boxes), location reports (frappr, Plazes), IM (Meebo), photos sharing (flickr), presence/status reports (twitter), social bookmarking (del.icio.us), documentation (wikis, Google docs), organizers (Remember The Milk) etc,. I use these apps to annotate my life but I already have a favoured annotation app - my blog editor (Performancing). And I know what blog editor I'll be using in future - Google ReWriter.
To annotate my life. For life caching. The Read-only Web has been replaced by the Read/Write web. And the Read/Write web orbits around me (and you!). Does the sun visit the planets? Or do the planets catch the rays? I radiate a stream of digital outputs, the ticker tape of my life, a continuous feed of annotations - my uniFeed. My satellite apps should catch those rays. My blog should render a subset of my uniFeed, my presense app another subset, my calendar another, etc,.
Why browse the web when the web can browse me? Am I the moth or the flame? Aggregation is the new browsing. I am at the center of gravity. My aggregator pulls all the pieces of my world together where I annotate it and radiate back out what matters to me.
But how will my satellites apps know which rays to catch? Thanks to microformats like comment, hCalendar and rel-tag. To be continued....
(This was part 2 in a 3 part series. Part 1 discussed the idea of an integrated aggregator/annotator (Google ReWriter). Part 3 will delve into the mechanisms that might replace the current comment architecture of the blogosphere.)
Technorati Tags: read/write, annotate, google rewriter, aggregation, life caching
This is where I think RDF comes into the picture. I could imagine a day where everything I do online is stowed in one portable, user-owned RDF dataset that automatically downloads to my hard drive once a night and I can carry around with me on a portable flash or hard drive.
Add a 'trust' layer on top of that - applications and web services would have to ask you to access your data - and you'd have a situation that is 180 degrees from where we are now. Instead of having a webapp with an API, you'd have individuals with APIs that the applications would tap in to. It would not only be very different from how we do it today, it would be greatly better than how we do it today.
Posted by: Tom Morris | January 18, 2007 at 04:39 PM