The browserless web
11-Jul-07
This thought has been churning round my head for a few weeks now.
It started when I went to the Apple Macworld press conference in London, and Steve Jobs announced Sherlock 3, which is as near as dammit a clone of established shareware application Watson.
Having got the story of the similarity between the two apps out of my system, I started to think about what Sherlock 3 (and Watson before it, and the original Sherlock before that) represented - tools for finding information on the web, without having to use a browser.
And that appealed to me, as it must appeal to lots of people, because _browsers are such a pain in the arse_.
Which probably explains why syndication feeds have suddenly become so hot. (Odd, the recent interest, given that syndication has been around for some time - what seemed to bring it about was the release of a decent feed reader for Mac OS X, NetNewsWire Lite, and subsequent mention of it on a myriad of weblogs, especially those run by Mac users.)
With syndication, you can publish stuff that people can read quickly and easily without having to fire up a browser. And, perhaps more importantly, you can *read* stuff without all that hassle too.
So what can we expect next from the browserless web?
Can browserless activity be extended into a two-way operation, whereby it is not only used for publishing but for, say, personal shopping? How about if you could create a personalised Amazon RSS feed, as an offshoot to your wishlist? Amazon would automatically check it and be able to make you offers based on what you wanted - but perhaps you could create a wider personal RSS shopping feed that you could submit to multiple shopping sites.
Maybe you could create a temporary feed with all your holiday requirements, and seed a few travel services with it. Wait 24 hours, check your email, and see which companies have matched your requirements and at which prices.
Where else could the browserless web go?
Interaction and community building. Quicktopic discussions can be turned into syndication feeds by just adding “.rss” to their URL, meaning you can read dozens of discussions without opening a browser. And the neat thing with Quicktopic is that you can post by email, too, so there’s yet another reason not to click that Mozilla icon.
In time, this might (just *might*) encourage web developers to build smaller, faster pages. After all, if large numbers of people abandon the web for their news readers, there will be some unhappy advertisers. And so far, I have not yet seen *any* advertising in a syndication feed.
I foresee advertisers trying to get in on the action. Going to all sorts of lengths to get people to subscribe to “personalised marketing messages” in the hope of bombarding them with advertising via RSS.
Another thing that might (just *might*) happen is software developers making smaller, faster browsers. If people could access the real web just as fast as they can syndication feeds, perhaps they might stick with it instead of resorting to their newsreader for good.
The more semantic the web gets, the less need there will be for a browser as we are accustomed to it. “Information-agent”-style apps will become more common.