….is the topic of my Thursday Signal over at the FM blog. From it:
….the architecture of “apps” is broken, and marketers can have a role in fixing it.
Broken? But it’s just getting started, right? Well, yes – and no. Apps are great, but they lack any number of characteristics that we’ve come to expect from a truly “Web 2” world. First (and certainly foremost), apps are not connected, in the main, to other apps. They are single use-case driven – a fact that often makes them compelling. But however useful a focused app may be, it can only get more useful if it could communicate with other apps, the way that great web services do. After all, a core tenet of the Web 2 movement was APIs and web services. YouTube would never have become a signal service of the web without being embeddable onto blogs. And blogs would never have risen without RSS.
Second, apps, for the most part, live in “AppWorlds” that are closed and vertically integrated (at least for Facebook and Apple). That means they don’t live in an open, market-driven environment, and are taxed by the owners of distribution channels even before they reach the consumer. That’s not an ecosystem that will drive second and third orders of innovation.
Third, apps live in a world of clutter….. (more)
The app store has such great potential, but so far, I’ve been a bit disappointed with what’s available.
The worst is the games section. What a load of shovelware.