dashes.com— "..we don't have much beyond copy and paste right now. If I want to put a NumSum or JotSpot spreadsheet into a Writeboard document, I basically can't do it..."
Mar 10, 2006View in Crawl 4
To elaborate my simple point above (that somehow people think warrants a thumbs-down):Anil Dash makes a very valid obversation that no matter how nifty and cool these different applications get, there isn't a way to string them together into one single group/document etc. for anything. Like 'improfane' said above, some sort of graphical pipes | could work too. Personally, I think this sort of thing can be done by better feeds and simple CSS.Suppose I am writing a document in say Writely and want to list the top 10 movies of all times between two paragraphs on page 3, I should just be able to query IMDb, get a permalink to a snapshot of the movie listings as of right now (or some fixed time in past, or live if I choose), and then be able to paste the permalink into my Writely document. Writely should realize this is a permalink and import the relevant data from IMDb.org and merge it with my stylesheets if provided. If I choose to make my document public, then anyone else can link to any page on my document, including the IMDb chart from their Gmail, Wiki, Movable Type blog, or even their own IMDb. profile page.Right now, people are already doing that by simply using img-src tag on their profiles, where src is a funny picture posted on dilbert.com - we just need to make it easier, more controlled, and more structured. I want to make live charts/graphs available on my personal site that anyone can embed into their web-based documents, emails etc, without using complex object-embed tags or JavaScripts. I guess some form of BBCode that browsers don't choke on and isn't a security issue. If I want to embed my home video in my web-based document (blog/email/IM/PDF), it should be easy to do so without purchasing any software. If Google Video doesn't want the paid videos to be embeded while making its free videos embeddable/copy-pastable, there should be a way to do so. But once imported/embedded, it should be up to the document creator to customize/skin the content. I don't want round-edged rectangles or faded backgrounds. I want high-contrast colors that print well.A lot of this is possible on desktops because you can just copy paste from one application to another. Ever tried right-click copying an eBay auction invoice into your QuickBooks Online account and having it merge automatically? If I could just somehow copy paste my flight information into my Kiko.com or Memotome.com account that'd be awesome. Whether you want to do it or not is up to you - privacy etc. will of course have to be handled and I'm sure it's not impossible to make it relatively secure. But I agree with author that once these web-apps start talking to each other, or rather, save us the effort of doing the same thing in every app (recreating my address book in 4 different places), things will get a lot more interesting.
But do you really think that posting comments like that on a site like this will get people to move over? It really just annoys people. I also love it how my comment got negative diggs so fast!
this was tried before and it failed. we had OLE from MS and we had openDOC which was supposed to be x-platform. the both sucked and nobody adopted them...
chimeMar 11, 2006
To elaborate my simple point above (that somehow people think warrants a thumbs-down):Anil Dash makes a very valid obversation that no matter how nifty and cool these different applications get, there isn't a way to string them together into one single group/document etc. for anything. Like 'improfane' said above, some sort of graphical pipes | could work too. Personally, I think this sort of thing can be done by better feeds and simple CSS.Suppose I am writing a document in say Writely and want to list the top 10 movies of all times between two paragraphs on page 3, I should just be able to query IMDb, get a permalink to a snapshot of the movie listings as of right now (or some fixed time in past, or live if I choose), and then be able to paste the permalink into my Writely document. Writely should realize this is a permalink and import the relevant data from IMDb.org and merge it with my stylesheets if provided. If I choose to make my document public, then anyone else can link to any page on my document, including the IMDb chart from their Gmail, Wiki, Movable Type blog, or even their own IMDb. profile page.Right now, people are already doing that by simply using img-src tag on their profiles, where src is a funny picture posted on dilbert.com - we just need to make it easier, more controlled, and more structured. I want to make live charts/graphs available on my personal site that anyone can embed into their web-based documents, emails etc, without using complex object-embed tags or JavaScripts. I guess some form of BBCode that browsers don't choke on and isn't a security issue. If I want to embed my home video in my web-based document (blog/email/IM/PDF), it should be easy to do so without purchasing any software. If Google Video doesn't want the paid videos to be embeded while making its free videos embeddable/copy-pastable, there should be a way to do so. But once imported/embedded, it should be up to the document creator to customize/skin the content. I don't want round-edged rectangles or faded backgrounds. I want high-contrast colors that print well.A lot of this is possible on desktops because you can just copy paste from one application to another. Ever tried right-click copying an eBay auction invoice into your QuickBooks Online account and having it merge automatically? If I could just somehow copy paste my flight information into my Kiko.com or Memotome.com account that'd be awesome. Whether you want to do it or not is up to you - privacy etc. will of course have to be handled and I'm sure it's not impossible to make it relatively secure. But I agree with author that once these web-apps start talking to each other, or rather, save us the effort of doing the same thing in every app (recreating my address book in 4 different places), things will get a lot more interesting.
petardMar 11, 2006
But do you really think that posting comments like that on a site like this will get people to move over? It really just annoys people. I also love it how my comment got negative diggs so fast!
monkeyboy87Mar 11, 2006
this was tried before and it failed. we had OLE from MS and we had openDOC which was supposed to be x-platform. the both sucked and nobody adopted them...
amygdelaMar 12, 2006
Boring!