The stay-at-home Web
Soon, there will be no reason to leave your little home on the Web.
Instead of having to jump around the Web looking for the stuff you are interested in, you can now simply stay on your home page and have everything come to right to you. All you have to do is get a gadget for the sites you regularly visit and make them show you just what you need.
Ok, so this has been around for a while now. But it’s about to get a whole lot better!
First of all, companies are starting to understand the need to provide snippets of functionality for their clients. For example, we have been working with a Fortune 100 company that is looking to build a whole gallery of gadgets that users can put on whatever site they want. This includes things like “Where’s my order?”, “Used equipment I may be interested in”, “Express Parts Order”.
The next thing you will be able to do from your home page will be social networking. Why leave your home page and go to a separate site just to socialize? Why not invite people to socialize right from your home page? Rumors abound about Google’s provision of this capability.
A big part of socializing is knowing when to visit. This is where an activity stream, like Facebook’s News Feed, becomes essential. For example, if you add new photos to your home site, anybody monitoring your activity stream will know about it and they can come visit. And they can do this through a gadget on their site, so they don’t actually have to come to your site. The gadget will provide a kind of virtual window on your life that others can see into.
This is all going to lead to some pretty interesting new ways of living on the Web…
