Friend Feed: Half the battle

When I think about the future of web apps, I think of remoteness. I think of being in one location and being able to both read and write to others. I want to setup a page of my own that allows me to interact with other sites in both for both retrieval and contribution. Imagine, a site where you can see your friends interactions with other sites and interact with those sites without leaving your current location. It’s not that hard to imagine… right now this type of ecosystem exists within the confines of Facebook, where, for example, I can update my twitter status and see others twitter updates without ever venturing to twitter itself. This is fine, but Facebook is not the internet… I’m essentially talking about a decentralized platform. So, what is Friend Feed? Well, probably a lot of people reading this already know, but for those that don’t… it’s the read part of the read write decentralized platform. We’ve reached a halfway point where I can read from other sites without having to visit them, but I can’t write to most of them unless they are contained somewhere. I want to be able to have a module that I control that allows me to post to Flickr, Facebook, or Delicious (not the best example) without having to visit the sites or go through an API. We’re at the point where we can read most content from nearly anywhere… next we need to be able to write. I might just do this with motask… enable people to take the site with them to anywhere else they want, even completely rebrand it… but contain the information within my database. I’m still working the details out… but with the simple nature of motask, it at least seems possible. There are many more examples where this is beginning to happen… but they are coming along slowly and all too often are left to the tech savvy. Somewhere between opensource and silo data lies the future of web interactivity, figuring out the right mix will determine the future of the web.