September 19, 2006

Smallr Apps

It seems everyone is heralding the arrival of smaller, more focused applications–often ones that are available online. Jon Udell, in an InfoWorld post, makes a comparison to Unix and its history of lightweight apps that do one thing, and do it well.

I want to agree with that comparison but there’s one nagging issue. Unix provides an environment where it is fairly trivial to assemble the pieces into something useful. For relatively literate users, there is a shallow hurdle to creating a novel script by piping output from one app to the input of another.

XML-based formats are providing us the groundwork (namely a readily parseable) way of sharing data all around. What is lacking is a environment to tie these together. Content aggregators and “paste-in” code widgets only superficially provide us with useful integration–and that’s usually only at the presentation layer. Developer APIs and Greasemonkey get us a bit further, as evidenced by the flurry of mashups, but still impose a steep learning curve on the user. In addition, these tend to require a lot of footwork and don’t lend themselves to creating one-off, disposable interfaces.

The small and focused unix apps owe much of their success to having a readily accessible means to chain them together and produce something more useful. The unix world has the data pipe: how could this metaphor be extended to these small online apps? How could we wire things together easily, and in ways not directly afforded by the widget creators and API developers?

I’m bullish on YubNub, a “social command line” for the web. It provides a relatively disposable method of working with content in a lightweight manner by hacking GET query strings. YubNub’s still in its formative stages so I can’t knock it for being a bit arcane to the average person. However, Lazyweb, I’m still searching for something like Apple’s Automator, which provides a set of prebuilt data query and transformation services in a “drag-and-chain” environment.