Molecularist

I think everyone now realizes that we are in the age of the fragmented Internet, the widgetization of everything.

To me, Netvibes is the poster child of this widgetization wave. It’s the one to watch.

But, it was made clear to me recently, mostly after playing with a particular app that I was promised would launch this week (sorry for the tease) Scrapblog, that, despite the claim, Netvibes is not ‘Mixing the Web’.

Netvibes is ‘Rearranging the Web’, yes, allowing us to grab (self-contained) pieces of our online world and bringing it to one place. That drum, I have been beating for ages.

But, the next Internet is not about widgets, but about truly ‘mixing the Internet’. It’s about bringing those pieces together and then exchanging the bits and pieces (hidden in those morsels, those widgets), in the way I want them to be.

This is not about mash-ups that some geek dreamt up and offered to the world, but more along the lines of Yahoo Pipes – for the masses.

That’s mixing. That’s getting all the pieces of my online life and having them mix and match and become a new something that the individual pieces (sometimes served in widget-sized morsels) were not.

While widgets are well suited for the mobile morselization of life, getting those pieces to interchange ‘stuff’ is a challenging design issue but also very helpful to the mobile lifestyle. Such remixing on mobile devices has been on my mind for some time, but now it has hit me much more clearly.

What do you think?

Update: Scrapblog did launch today. Hooray. I can see many ways this app is great and will do well.

Had to react to this one that was sent to me (video below). It’s a beguiling list of stats that in the end are just an egoistical and purely numerical view of the past 10 years, projected on the next 50. It’s the very thing that Vernon Vinge and Ray Kurzweil would live to recite.

But, it’s wrong. These relatively isolated stats are misleading and, to me, reveal actually some prejudices and fears, rather than some objective description of the world today that can be used to predict the future. And they leave out so much that would help any real prediction.

Every age thinks that they are at the peak of civilization and that, when drawing a straight (or logarithmic) line from that day, it leads to some incredibly out-of-this-world future.

I am sure if we repeated this exercise 100 or 1000 years ago, we would have an amazing future, too, but one based on our foundations at the time. The past is littered with amazing predictions blown to smithereens by things that appear out of nowhere and rearrange everything.

Yeah, shift happens, but don’t think current stats can suggest what that shift will be.

YouTube – Did You Know; Shift Happens – Globalization; Information Age

Can you tell that I’m an arch-skeptic when it comes to stats? It’s the scientist in me. Please excuse me this rant.