On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:06 PM, Jorge Amodio<jmamodio@gmail.com> wrote:
Talking about the subject with a friend during the past few days, most of the conversation ended being around the User Interface.
A popular idiom is "where the rubber meets the road". It comes from cars, of course. The contact patch between tire and surface. If those 100 square inches or so don't provide what's needed, nobody cares how elegant the rest of the car is. In information systems, the UI is where the rubber meets the road.
When grandma wants to do on-line banking she does not care about a cryptic URL, or if it has a .bank gTLD or if by the magic of IDN she is able to write it in polish, she just wants to get to her bank account ...
Exactly. I think it would be nice if we had some nicely designed, elegant, centralized protocol to do all this, but I suspect that won't happen. Instead I think we'll have a bunch of ad hoc solutions, and then ad hoc solutions that attempt to meta the ad hoc soltions. Someone's already suggested this in another thread. So someone will log into GMyLinkedBook or whatever, which then makes use of Facebook to find a friend, which then talks to AIM to contact them on their iPhone via some other damn thing. Yes, it'll be a mess. So's most of the rest of the world. Keeps us IT guys in work, I guess. -- Ben