No critical mass

So it's interesting. I've got flickr going from my cell phone, I've got twitter going from my cell phone. I can post to the blog, twitter, or flickr, all from my cell. But there still is some critical mass piece missing. There's not this nice transition or merging of their functionalities, especially where there is overlap. It still feels like forcing things together.

I liken this to the difference between separate database, spreadsheet, and word processing programs that can share information and work together and the Microsoft Office suite. There's still some thing missing which makes it feel like a nice integrated experience.

I think that digsby is trying to accomplish some of that. This also reminds me of long time back when Apple had these object oriented content pieces would combine to form Voltron or something equally impressive. It was called OpenDoc. Looked really nifty in the demos, never seemed to go anywhere.

I suspect that there is still some magic piece missing in the seemless integration and interfacing to related data and content that is produced in fundamentally different ways. Too much context switching maybe? If you consider how you would present a document, say using a Word doc as a container with embedded Excel charts, video, and other items, it feels still very clumsy. Individual apps interact well with people, but the products of those apps merged(dare I say 'mashups') together doesn't interact as a whole very well even if they make something pretty looking.