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15 Nov 2006
Opening up applications
Marc Canter defines the rules for walled gardens on the web. I realised that the same is true for applications. An application should not act as a silo or walled garden either. And what I see happening on the Mac, is that applications are opening up. It seems more like using other applications data, than adding to that data.
For instance the Web site development package Sandvox allows users to add images, movies and bookmarks to web-pages. An other non-Apple applications do similar things. This follows other Apple applications such as Pages or Keynote. Or goes back to even earlier applications such as Mail, where one can access Items (mail addresses) created in AddressBook. What we see here is a MicroContent Layer, which can be accessed by any application that needs an Item form that layer. At the moment this layer consists of address cards, images, videos, audio, bookmarks. Access to these MicroContent Types is through the Media browser or Address Panel. Note that all these MicroContent Types share the fact that they can be stored as individual files.
One can foresee that this idea of an independent layer with MicroContent will be extended in the future to encompass other Types, such as events and todo's (on the horizon). I do not see any signs to extend to other types (reviews, recipes, etc). By the way we talk here about mashing and not just viewing.
And even further on the horizon I expect integration with MicroContent on the Internet. Only addresses on LDAP servers are possible now. I'll keep my eye open for other examples.