the Onda

I've started the year by trying to make a dent in my backlog of small (but useful) webapps to try, beginning with the "help organize your life" category. So in the last few days I've tried: Jott, Iwantsandy, and Remember the Milk, and already I'm feeling overloaded.

All three are all really well done mini-applications that do a single function well, play nice with other pieces of the web (a la Unix tools), and provide clever interfaces that span multiple devices, input mechanisms, and output formats. And yet, why is it that after only trying three of them, I'm already feeling app fatigue?

I think it must have to do with the small incremental cognitive load imposed by each new webapp. Because no matter how similar each of these applications is— after all they are each a way to manage a list of reminders— there are still small differences that impose a small barrier at every use. And despite each site's desire to simplify the interface as much as possible, I've still got to go link hunting across non-standard interfaces every time I want to do basic things like creating new categories or adding a new email address.

I used to think that the old "Office Suite" megaproduct was a function of distribution economics alone; that Microsoft beat out all of the best-of-breed standalone applications because they could bundle all of the products together into a cheaper overall offering and stuff it into the channel. But now I'm realizing that there are huge advantages to this type of integration when it comes to usability (and I don't mean power features like OLE, these new webapps already support their own forms of foreign object embedding). With MS Office, the user had more or less one mental model for how to perform a whole load of related tasks (a model which has been increasingly unified with each Office release)— a huge advantage for those of us just trying to get things done.

Do we need this unification for all of these little webapps to reach critical mass? Maybe. The counter argument would be that the web audience is so big that every application vendor will find his own niche audience, but in a world where sustainable economics depends on advertising (and therefore audience scale), I'm not sure this works. And if we do need this grand unification, will it be brought on by a vendor (Facebook, Google) or by a set of standards (microformats, Yahoo UI best practices)? Right now I'd put my money on the integrating vendor platform a la F8 or Google Gadgets, but maybe that is just because I am looking for the modern day Office-like player. Maybe the rules have really changed on the web...

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