These days we all have at least one email account, one Twitter account, we’re also on Facebook, and a myriad of other online services, so wouldn’t it be nice if we could go to just one place on our phone, a universal inbox, to interact with all the flood of notifications we receive? The answer is surprisingly no. There’s a reason we keep all of our networks separate, and each service has a different mode of interaction, but that hasn’t stopped the folks at Nokia’s Research Labs to try and make this age old concept work … again.
Every year there’s some startup that tries this, gets a load of funding, comes out with terribly buggy software, and then they’re immediately forgotten or worse yet laughed at for even trying to achieve such a colosal task. Take Nokia’s own bundled “Social Networks” application that comes with the latest Symbian^3 devices. When Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, whatever, enhance their service with new features … you’re left waiting for an update. Then there’s Gravity, an application that makes interacting with various services such as Twitter and Facebook easy. It was created by a single guy and has received accolades from Nokia users around the world. How come one dude can make something better than an entire team of researchers, designers, and software developers at a multinational corporation?
There’s nothing wrong with building a unified notification panel. Android has done this remarkably well and with a simple swipe gesture a user can see which services have received new updates. The user then clicks on that notification and then they’re taken to that service’s respective Android application. That works. Building an entirely new application so you can interact with services using an interaction model designed by an external third party? That doesn’t work, and that’s what Nokia is trying to do.
The real “Web 3.0” will be when services don’t care about the interaction layer, they just provide data hooks so if someone wanted to create their own Facebook or Twitter experience and make it so convincing that you never have to visit either of those services pre-designed websites again, then it’s totally OK with the owner of said data. When that happens, we’ll be in the future. Until then we’re going to be forced to interact with services on their terms because they need to fund themselves by showing silly little ads on the side. Ads that no one even pays attention to.
[Via: Arctic Startup, Technology Review]