[Sigia-l] The new face of web info

[Ziya Oz]

Since people often ask me privately what new and exciting apps are coming
onto the Mac OS X scene wrt to IA, I thought I'd mention two:

Watson 1.5
<http://www.karelia.com/watson/>

The best desktop application I can think of that puts a human face to web
services. If you try it (on a broadband connection) and don't like it, I'll
buy you a beverage of your choice when you're next in NYC. The service with
the highest wow factor: Movies. Other than copyright, syndication and
licensing issues, the possibilities are limitless. The developer could add
an HTML renderer (perhaps the Gecko engine) as a drawer at the bottom and
you won't even need a web browser for 90% of your needs.

Plucky 1.0.3
<http://geoffreygrosenbach.com/plucky_help.html>

The simplest and the best news/info aggregator and monitoring app yet. It's
still being refined and could use another cycle of improvements in adding
sites for monitoring, smart parsing and exception handling, but it's quite
efficient as is.

If you integrate Plucky into Watson (and something like that, I'm sure, will
happen) and add a few more services, I can easily see configuring Watson
(with Gecko) for special needs and eliminating the web browser entirely for
many demographic segments.

I find the notion of desktop apps that cleverly integrate web/Internet a
refreshing new path. Inefficiencies in info gathering/parsing inherent in
web browsers become appallingly obvious after a five-minute session with
Watson. The cost of these apps are about a couple of movie tickets; the
amount info they bring to your desktop and the ease with which they do it
would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Ain't technology great :-)

Best,

Ziya