After each Carsonified conference, I like to ask myself the question, what does the future hold? In this case, what is the future of web apps? (Just like the name of the conference… FOWA)
Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has a really good talk yesterday. He demoed Mozilla’s project to create a command line for the Web, Ubiquity. The interesting part was how it made it easy to take the functionality of certain Web apps and use them right where they were needed instead of having to go back to the destination site.
Aza had some good examples. With a few strokes of the keyboard, he could drop a Google Map or a Yelp listing into a Gmail message. In the same amount of time he was able to translate a chunk of text on a Japanese Web site into English then Spanish and then French.
It really illustrated one tenant which I think is the future of Web apps that it’s no longer about building a great Web app. It’s about building a great Web service or piece of functionality that I can take with me and use wherever I want to use it.
I meet sooooo many folks who have great ideas for Web apps and I’m sure they’ll all be very helpful. I have to ask myself though… is it good/helpful enough that I’m going to integrate it into my life? Am I going to create a tab open open in Firefox or Safari so that I can have easy access to it whenever I want?
I tell you… I don’t leave Google Translate open, even though it is useful but it seems to be more at home for me to be able to select text I want to translate on a Web site and have it just be translated in-line. It’s make taking this service and using where I want it to be.
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