Molecularist - Part 173

Sippey, thanks so much for finding this snippet of insight (see link and quote below). This whole idea of widgets, bookmarklets, badges and such has been near and dear to me for some time now.

Over the past year and a half, at least, I have been working myself along this line of thought, picking up tidbits from various areas – Fabio Sergio giving me the name I use to describe this (‘morsels’, from a presentation of his), talks with Dave from WINKsite (some relevant stuff I wrote here and here), great stuff from Rich McManus (my summary article here) and Marc Canter (some relevant posts of mine here and here), and playing with Netvibes, Google Personal, Widsets, and so on.

Indeed, on and off over this time period, I have been trying to actually ‘do’ something about it (and there are many reasons for nothing happening). I think this ‘splintering’ or ‘morselization’ of the Web is well-suited for the mobile lifestyle – snippets delivered in mobile-savvy sizes in mobile-savvy appropriateness.

Yeah, this whole thing gets me shiverin’ in excitement and I’ve been able to meet some kindred souls here at work who, without my prompting, revealed that they also see this trend, it’s relevance to the future of the Web, and its role in the fusion of mobile and Web and desktop.

Maybe, together, we can actually make something happen.

🙂

Link [via Sippey]: The Next Net: 2007: The Web Widget.

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don’t matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web.

Strategy/The Narrative

About stolen phones and a sort of happy ending

Posted on 05 January 2007 by charlie

It stinks to lose a phone. Here’s Suw Charman’s story of the loss of her trusty E61. Suw is well known in the tech world.

Link [from Ewan]: Chocolate and Vodka :: Just had my phone stolen

But, to cap it all, I was just starting to really love that phone. 19 days is just enough to start to get used to the way a new OS and a new phone works. I liked the shortcuts that made using the phone simple, I liked the Symbian OS which allows you to run more than one process at a time (in stark contrast to Palm, which has to fake it), I liked the form of the E61, it’s QWERTY keyboard and its nice, bright screen. More than anything, I loved having Google Maps on it, and Google Mail. I adored the web browser which made surfing the net on a phone actually doable. I was totally in love with the wifi.

Alas, she had insurance, so it turned out OK. She got a new phone, but there was a mess up with transferring her phone number. Also, she’s made no comment on the data and such.

We’ve all been in this business for so long and know that small mobile devices are lost and stolen in droves. And the market has the right solution out there, so that’s not so bad. I am just wondering why there are not better solutions than plain insurance – where’s the data backup, the data transfer, the clear understanding of what to do (she guessed and hoped and lucked out)?

Yup. A biz opportunity that has been left on the table for a long time. And I think many of the ideas I have heard in this space are not thinking the right way.

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