Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger
Just finished reading David Weinbergers excellent “Everything is Miscellaneous“. David sums it up nicely in a companion essay on Amazon:
As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash–adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like “flocking behavior,” joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.
I think the same idea can be applied not just to information, but also to functionality. We are seeing this with the gadgetization of the enterprise. Let’s take the first part of David’s paragraph and adapt it to this:
As businesses go miscellaneous, functionality gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash–adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection.
Once functionality is broken down into small pieces, users can create their own “applications” out of functionality that is meaningful just to them. This functionality is delivered in the form of a gadget, which can be placed on e.g. an iGoogle page. For example, an accounting person can include a gadget on their iGoogle page that just shows the outstanding invoices for a particular customer, and allows them to accept payment through the gadget. An insurance agent may include a gadget that shows which of their clients have birthdays today and provides different ways to communicate with them from within the gadget. There is no need for the user to access the underlying applications that house this functionality. All that is needed are the small pieces of functionality that the user can put anywhere, in a way that makes the most sense to them (as opposed to what makes sense to IT).
This is just the start of the move towards gadgetization. The future will bring simple ways to (to borrow a phrase from David’s earlier book) loosely join gadgets into more sophisticated applications where they can work together in unison. This is different from a mashup, which wikipedia defines as a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience.
By complete coincidence, we happened to get a support question from David last week. He was moving his Gmail account using our gXFER product. He blogs about his experience here. We had a brief chat about using labels in Gmail. As you would expect, David treats the bulk of his mail as “miscellaneous” and uses search to find what he needs. The beauty of having Google search in Gmail…
